Commissaire Paulin raced like a bullet through Accident and Emergency at Timone hospital. He shoved aside a nurse who was pushing a trolley out of lift B, and grunted at the boys from special branch and the flying squad who greeted him with silent nods. Maxime Vidal and Anne Moracchini sat at the end of the corridor looking exhausted. Paulin sidestepped them and pushed open the door of the last room.
It was 5:00 a.m. Thomas Autran was lying on a metal bed, handcuffed at both wrists and both ankles. Paulin adopted his toughest expression and inspected him for a few seconds.
“When can we take him away?” he barked at the doctor who was finishing off a dressing.
“In about a quarter of an hour, after I’ve signed the necessary papers. The wound is superficial. The bullet didn’t touch his kneecap, it just went through the muscles.”
“Very good, I’ll arrange the necessary transport.”
Paulin went out into the corridor.
“Don’t you want to get some rest, Vidal? You look awful …”
“No thanks, Commissaire. I’d rather stay.”
“What about you, Moracchini?”
“I’ll stay with Maxime.”
Paulin leaned on the wall facing them and stuck his hands into his jacket pockets. Moracchini’s eyes were red with fatigue and her forehead was creased. Her shoes were stained with the red soil of the creeks. Vidal’s face was deathly pale.
“I’ve just come back from La Conception hospital. He’s been in theater for a hour now. That’s all I know.”
Anne Moracchini stood up and walked toward the lift to calm herself down. Vidal kept staring at the corridor’s gleaming floor tiles.
“Sylvie is in the psychiatric department,” he stammered. “No-one can see her for the moment.”
“I … It would be better if … I’d rather you waited at headquarters,” muttered Paulin. “There’s nothing more you can do here …”
Vidal was lost in the darkest stretches of his conscience. He was playing back over and again the film of that night.
He bursts into the main section of Le Guen’s Cave. Thomas Autran raises his tomahawk above the Baron’s bloody head. From the end of his rope, Maxime draws and fires once, twice, three times … He aims at the head and torso. The thunder of shots echoes from one vault to the next, making the entire cave quake. He no longer knows how many times he has fired. Thomas Autran bends over and collapses. Two men from special branch rush across and overcome him. There are kicks to his stomach, a boot in his face … Then the clicking of handcuffs.
De Palma is unrecognizable. He is covered with blood. His forehead has been cut open and his shoulder torn apart. Disfigured. His breathing is weak, almost non-existent, a long rasping sound emerges from his paralyzed throat. His life is wavering between here and the great void beyond. His heart beats irregularly, his chest rises suddenly, then falls again. His body is stiffening, trembling all over, tormented by death which seeks its prey.
“Luc Chauvy,” Maxime repeated. “Why didn’t it occur to me before? Why didn’t I say anything to Michel?” He felt nauseous.
“Are you listening to me, Maxime?”
Vidal jumped.
“Yes, Commissaire …”
“I was saying that you should go back to headquarters and get some rest, if you can.”
Moracchini took him by the arm.
“Come on, Maxime. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
Before going to headquarters, Moracchini and Vidal spent some time at La Conception. Since 6:00 a.m., Jean-Louis Maistre had been prowling like a wild cat in the waiting room of the Accident and Emergency Department.
“Still nothing,” he yelled, clenching his teeth. “NOTHING AT ALL, for fuck’s sake!”
A doctor emerged from the operating theater and took off her mask. She seemed exhausted. The three police officers surrounded her at once.
“I can’t tell you anything yet,” she said, raising her hands. “We brought him back from the edge … twice. We’ve now stabilized his condition and put him in an artificial coma. This means that the surgeons will be able to operate in the best possible circumstances. But the operation could be a long one. A very long one.”
Maistre took the doctor by her arm.
“You’re going to save him, aren’t you?”
“Are you a member of the family?”
“No, but we’ll have to tell his parents. They’re old now …”
Maistre squeezed the doctor’s arm.
“Please stay calm, sir … I can reassure you that there’s now a good chance he’ll pull through.”
“Will there be …”
“Any after-effects? Maybe, but I really can’t say. That’s not my specialty. Anyway, we don’t yet know what they might be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that … that we just don’t know.”
8:00 a.m. Vidal and Moracchini dashed through the courtyard of headquarters, where swarms of journalists had started to gather. On the murder squad floor, by the planning board, officers were talking in hushed tones. When they caught sight of Vidal, his features twisted in anger, they silently stepped aside. Anne Moracchini passed through the group like a shadow.
The door opened on Paulin and Didier Salerno, a murder squad veteran who knew nothing about the case.
Paulin stood up at once and dragged de Palma’s teammates into the corridor.
“I told you to get some rest. I’m looking at the situation with Salerno. The two of them are in their cells, and I’m not going to let you question them in the state you’re in now.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Vidal replied coldly. “This is our case, and we’ll see it through to the end.”
Paulin’s eyes glittered with anger.
“Maxime means we’re the only ones who know the case and …”
“I gave you an order,” he said.
Vidal clenched his fists. He swallowed back his rage and stared at Paulin.
“Commissaire, I don’t know what you have in mind …” he retorted in a calm voice which disarmed Paulin. “But let me tell you something. We worked hard on this case, our teammate is now fighting for his life, and you have no right to take this away from us. NO RIGHT AT ALL.”
Paulin cracked his finger joints. Moracchini felt on the verge of oblivion. She observed her superior and barely managed to conceal her scorn.
“O.K., calm down. I’ll give you two hours to ask your questions,” Paulin murmured, pointing his index finger at Vidal. “But if there’s the slightest irregularity, I’ll … I’ll take over again. Two hours, and then we’ll discuss the situation. Understood? Barbieri will be here at 11:00.”
They brought Thomas and Christine Autran to the offices of the murder squad. The hunter was drained; his lips were drooping slightly and two long wrinkles ran the length of his temples. Moracchini and Vidal decided to separate the twins, and Moracchini led Thomas into her office.
Vidal was left alone with the prehistorian. Since her arrest in the cave, he had not had time to look at her properly. Contrary to what he had feared, he felt nothing for her her, neither hatred nor pity. He sat down opposite her.
“You have been placed in custody on suspicion of murder, aiding and abetting murder and sequestration. I suppose you realize that you risk life imprisonment. Do you have anything to say before we begin?”
Christine remained silent. Vidal had not handcuffed her to the radiator. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, completely self-absorbed, with her knees together and her hands clenched around the chain of her cuffs.
The morning sun shone through the window. Vidal stood up and drew the curtains. He then opened the communicating door between the two offices so that Christine could hear her brother being questioned.
“O.K.,” Moracchini said. “Let’s begin at the beginning. I’ll go through some of the things you are accused of, as Commandant de Palma, Lieutenant Vidal and I see them. Agreed?”
A long silence, which was unbearable after the tension of the previous night. Moracchini started to prowl around Thomas Autran.
“First point. When Le Guen discovered the cave, your sister soon heard about it … In my opinion, it was Luccioni, who knew the diving community well, who told her what had become an open secret in that small world. But she also told you that Le Guen was going to announce his discovery, and she asked you to be on guard day and night. We’ve checked, and you were in France at the time. You were supposed to be just passing through … We think that when you saw a group of divers going into the entrance tunnel, you drowned them by stirring up the mud on the seabed—that would have been enough. No-one can see anything through such a murky deposit. That was nine years ago.”
Thomas Autran did not respond. Vidal watched his sister. Her eyes were glazed, and she did not seem to hear what was being said in the next room.
“But,” Moracchini went on, “Le Guen was not one of those in the tunnel, so you failed to stop the existence of the cave being revealed. You left again on your travels, to Australia I believe. During your absence, your sister decided to look for a second entrance. She searched for a long time, but only found it quite recently, just before … her death. Agreed?”
Autran was not looking at her. An image of de Palma on his stretcher flickered across her mind and struck her like a sword. She had to draw on her last reserves to stop herself from exploding.
“Sometime last year, you came back to France. Agnès Féraud, one of your sister’s friends, was killed … we think by you … Then everything speeded up. There were the murders of Luccioni, Hélène Weill and Julia Chevallier. Right or wrong?”
Autran remained locked in silence. Moracchini stopped pacing and approached him.
“But by killing Luccioni, you made a terrible mistake, because straight afterward his father, Jo Luccioni, put a contract on your heads … You were being followed and you knew it. Things were getting out of hand. So you both had to disappear, and fast! You then cooked up Christine’s fake murder.”
Autran straightened up. His expression softened slightly; the long wrinkles melted into his skin and his lips trembled.
“Thomas,” Moracchini said in a more gentle voice. “I think you’re sister’s been using you right from the start. She’s been manipulating you. She knows all about your fits of madness and how to exploit them.”
With his eyes, Thomas Autran made it clear that he did not want to talk about his sister. Nor his father. Nor his mother. He did not want to talk, and he would not talk.
She did not press the point. The face of the man sitting in front of her was loquacious enough about the sufferings he must have endured all his life.
In the other office, Vidal stared long and hard at Christine. “Christine, you’ve heard what my colleague has said. What do you think about her version of events?”
She did not react. Her entire body was frozen. For a moment, Vidal wondered if she could hear what he was saying.
“I think it would be better for you if you spoke. In any case, you’ll be formally charged, by tomorrow at the latest.”
This dialogue with the deaf continued until 10:00 a.m. Vidal sensed that he had failed to exploit the interrogation. He went to see Moracchini and took her to one side.
“I don’t think we’re going to get anything out of Christine. I reckon we ought to send for a quack. She’s dead on her feet. Come and see.”
“No thanks, she terrifies me. Anyway, we’re going to put them up before the judge this afternoon. Just lock her back in her cell and forget it. Jesus Christ. If only Michel was here …”
“We’ll have to do our best, for his sake … She’s got to speak! Because … apart from the fact that she vanished and is an accomplice, we haven’t got much on her.”
“O.K., do you feel up to going on with him?”
“Yes, I’m ready.”
“Perfect. But first, we’ll go and see Paulin. We’ll give an initial report then start again this afternoon. I need to eat and get some rest.”
At 11:00 a.m., Maistre’s mobile rang.
“Jean-Louis, it’s Marie … what’s happened? My parents were incapable of telling me …”
Marie was in a complete panic, her voice was shaking.
“They’re operating on Michel … He’s been … Jesus Christ, Marie.”
There was a long silence. Maistre flopped on to the sofa in reception and, for the first time in ages, started to cry.
“I’m in Paris at the moment, I’ll take the first train … or the first plane … I don’t know … I don’t know any more.”
“I told him to slow down a bit, to watch out for himself, but he always had to push things even further …”
“Is he …?”
“The medics have no idea, they haven’t told me anything …”
“I’ll be there by mid afternoon.”
In theater, the surgical team had just added a final stitch to De Palma’s shoulder; there were twenty-one of them in all. His trapezoid and deltoid had been cut almost in half, and two pins had been inserted into his clavicle. The operation had taken longer than expected. During the first hour, they had had to revive him twice.
On the other side of the operating table, Dr. Semler, a brain surgeon, was waiting for Dr. Janssen, head of the casualty department, to remove one by one the last pieces of the miner’s lamp from his naval cavity.
Semler felt tense. Which nerves had been touched? The frontal nerve, for sure—Janssen had just confirmed that fact—but what worried him most were the optic nerves. The lamp and its battery had turned the flint ax away from the skull toward the space between the eyes.
Semler glanced at the skull X-rays. The weapon had hit the frontal bone, but without reaching the dura mater or the brain. The nasal bones and cartilage had been completely shattered, and the pyramidal and triangular muscles severed. It was difficult to form a precise and complete diagnosis. Professor Riaux, the ophthalmologist, would be there around noon.
3:00 p.m. Moracchini had fought with Barbieri and Paulin to keep control of the questioning. She now knew that she had to contain her anger and change tactics. She sat down next to Christine Autran and held her hand.
“In your articles, I’ve read your theories about the rising sea level … Well before Le Guen’s discovery confirmed your work! You were ahead of your time and the laughing stock of your colleagues. Even Palestro didn’t really believe in you.”
Christine coughed. She looked less tense.
“But you couldn’t bear it that a man like Le Guen stole this discovery right from under your nose.”
Christine’s hand trembled a little. Moracchini gripped it tighter, and they stayed like that for some time. Then Christine slowly raised her head.
“Le Guen … is a wonderful man,” she mumbled. “He gave us our … our Provençal Lascaux.”
Her head drooped again. She breathed in deeply.
“I … I never asked my brother to kill him. That was his own idea … he wanted to please me.”
Christine gulped. Moracchini stroked the back of her hand with her thumb.
“Can you explain how all this happened?”
“There’s … there’s nothing to explain … My brother became a killer long ago … When our mother died … If you can call her a mother …”
She stared at Moracchini, as though she could see her tormented existence mirrored there.
“Thomas acts only in relationship with me. He … he interprets everything I say or do in his own way …”
She squirmed in her chair and took a deep breath. Two beams of light glittered across her face.
“He knew I was working on anthropophagy … One day last year, he brought me a woman’s leg.”
The police photos ran through Moracchini’s mind like a sordid slide show. A half-naked woman on a blood-soaked mattress, her guts hanging out, her leg severed. A woman lying on leaves in a wood, wearing a mauve suit and high heels. A mash of brains and bone. A vision of de Palma lying on the stretcher. She was almost suffocating. She closed her eyes and concentrated.
“What about Franck Luccioni?”
“Thomas couldn’t bear it when someone grew close to me. When he came back from his trip to Australia last year, I thought he’d been cured, but …”
“He wasn’t … The contact he’d had with shamans he’d met during his travels had in fact exacerbated his insanity.”
“He couldn’t stand me having friends, or anyone touching or hurting me.”
Christine let go of Moracchini’s hand and started rocking on her chair.
“The only male friend I ever had was Franck … Poor Franck … If our father had lived, Thomas would never have turned out this way. If our father had lived, we’d all still be together.”
“Why?”
“When our father died, Thomas was struck dumb. He was incapable of saying anything …”
For the first time since the start of the questioning, Christine’s knees relaxed.
“Then what happened?”
“He became so self-absorbed that he stopped going out … At certain times, he communicated only with signs.”
“What about your mother?”
“The only thing she could think of doing was to send him to a home. It was hell … Violence became his only defense …”
Moracchini stood up and gently laid her hand on Christine’s shoulder.
“Then you and your brother killed your mother …”
She felt Christine’s entire body quake. It was enough of an answer.
“It was then that he began to become interested in prehistory and everything to do with the first men. He saw it as the ideal state of humanity. Before our morality, before all the evils of our civilized society … In fact it was he who led me to start studying the subject … It was a passion we shared.”
“What strange concepts!”
“Strange to you … but if you knew these men and women, you wouldn’t think like that!”
“I suppose not, but all this doesn’t explain such horribly violent murders!”
“It may not excuse them, but it does explain them … When you’ve been humiliated all your life, you end up losing your reason …”
“So it was you who enabled Thomas to meet primitive tribes?”
“Yes, it was me. He came with me on several occasions, and I pulled strings with the Kajabbi mission to get him odd jobs. At the beginning, he did rather well …”
“Why do you say ‘at the beginning’?”
“Because after about a year, he started to miss me. He was beginning to lose the ability to speak again.”
Christine twisted her fingers nervously.
Vidal got nothing out of Thomas Autran. For an hour it felt as if he were questioning a slab of granite. On several occasions he had to stop himself from hitting the man in front of him. Yet he never let his hatred show, nor raised his voice. As time went by, he became more and more surprised that he was not succumbing to fatigue or anger. He was still in control of himself.
After an hour, he showed Thomas irrefutable proof of his guilt: the results of the D.N.A. tests on samples taken from Caillol’s house and the negative hands. It was a perfect piece of evidence, but it did not draw a single word from Thomas Autran’s lips.
At 4:30 p.m., Vidal handed him the transcript of his interrogation. He signed it without hesitating, without even reading it. The text accused him of murdering Franck Luccioni, Hélène Weill and Julia Chevallier, of kidnapping Sylvie Maurel and of the attempted murder of a police officer. Autran accepted the whole package without even trying to defend himself. At 5:00 p.m., he was taken back to his cell.
Moracchini opened the window to let in the sea air.
“Why did you ask Caillol to let Thomas out of hospital? You knew what would happen—you did just the opposite of what you should have.”
“No, at the time, I had no idea.”
Christine explained that Thomas had been interned a month after their mother’s death, and it was then that his unhealthy affection for her had intensified. Caillol had done a lot for him.
“There’s still something I don’t understand: why did your brother try to frame Caillol?”
“Thomas is extremely intelligent, far more so than you or I. Despite his madness, he realized that the police would track him down, so he used Caillol as a scapegoat.”
“O.K., now let’s go back to when he left France for the second time …”
“I asked him to go.”
“After the deaths of the divers?”
Christine’s eyes clouded over. She went pale.
“Did you hear my question, Christine?”
She nodded her head nervously.
“And what’s your answer?”
“I …”
“You didn’t know it was him?”
“No.”
A gust of fresh air spread through the office, carrying with it the din of the city. Moracchini sat down and stretched in her chair.
“Why did you decide to disappear?”
“After Franck’s death, I noticed a man following me. I knew about his father’s past, and I soon realized that I was going to have to vanish forever.”
“How did Luccioni find out?”
“I have no idea …”
“What about the corpse we found in Sugiton creek?”
“My brother set up the entire thing.”
“And you did nothing to stop him!”
“My brother’s ill. He doesn’t reason like you or me. He presented me with a fait accompli … But you’re right, I didn’t say anything.”
“It’s odd that you’re not trying to defend him.”
“I did that for years. I tried everything, but I’ve had enough. Anyway, sooner or later, all this was bound to happen.”
Anne was not sure if Christine’s answers were a simple strategy to make herself look innocent, or if they reflected the truth. Fatigue suddenly swamped her; she had not slept for two days. But her brain was still working overtime.
“If you had so much power over him, why didn’t you try to stop him from turning into a monster?”
“I did … by entering into his madness. By making him believe that I could communicate with spirits …”
Moracchini went over to her and spoke almost directly into her ear.
“Christine, I really can’t swallow all this. In fact, I don’t believe you. So why don’t you tell me everything? There’s a gaping wound, an awful trauma in your life. You love your brother more than anything, even more than you love yourself. You loved that little boy who was so gentle and happy, and you hated your mother who beat him like the crazy woman she was. That boy who was your other half, your flesh and blood … And that terrible mother who let you get away with everything because you were her daughter, and who tortured him because he was unwanted, who mistreated him so badly that the neighbors thought he was ill. It should be Martine Autran sitting here today. Whether it was an accident or not, she was behind your father’s death, and your brother avenged him. After that, he lost his sanity and started killing anyone who threatened to separate you. And you let him get on with it.”
“I …”
“I think that’s the explanation for Luccioni’s death … He must have known many of your secrets … he knew about the hand you brought back from the U.S.A., which he tried to sell to a fence because you’d asked him to … The same hand we found in your brother’s bedroom. You needed the money to start a new life.”
Moracchini drew back suddenly.
“I know what you did during your first hours in custody. You had a long think and you said to yourself: ‘the only way to be with him again is to get as short a sentence as possible.’ Because, as you must realize, prison is going to separate you for decades. Perhaps forever. So you thought: ‘I’ll make them think that he’s the murderer, then at most I’ll be accused of aiding and abetting him …’ It was a good idea, Christine, but men and women have lost their lives, and this evening I’m sending you in front of the judge. What will you say to him?”
“My only crime is to have loved my father and my brother more than anything.”
“Your crime is to have followed your brother, and perhaps even encouraged or manipulated him. That’s what Commandant de Palma thinks. Your crime is to have taken part in the kidnapping of a woman and helped to draw our fellow officer into a fatal trap. These are the facts.”
Moracchini could no longer control herself. She felt like slapping Christine Autran, but then she pulled herself together at the last moment.
“Your CRIME IS TO HAVE TRIED TO MURDER OUR TEAMMATE! DO YOU HEAR ME?”
Vidal was on his way back from the cells when he heard her outburst. He rushed into the office. Paulin and Salerno were already there, separating the Capitaine from Christine. Moracchini was at the end of her tether; fury and hatred twisted her features.
Paulin had already decided to send the twins in front of the judge, and then examine the rest of the case file the following week. Given de Palma’s absence, it would be pointless for his teammates to go through his papers; they would find nothing of any use. De Palma was totally inscrutable. It was his main failing. Only he could take this questioning any further.
The Commissaire took Moracchini by the arm and led her into the corridor. Despite his exhaustion, Vidal wanted to ask Christine a whole series of questions about her trips to the U.S.A. and the death of Anna McCabe. But he settled for asking her why she had so wanted to go inside Le Guen’s Cave.
“For the past ten years, I’ve been working on shamanism. It might sound odd to you, but I thought I had acquired certain powers. I thought that the animal-spirits could heal my brother. So, I needed a gateway to the other world. My brother is utterly obsessed by Le Guen’s Cave. My only hope was to get him inside the sanctuary so that the spirits could do their work … I knew there was a second entrance, but I didn’t find it until the beginning of December. The first thing I did was to take my brother inside. And, for the first time for …”
Christine was holding back her tears. Her chest rose and fell violently.
“He was really mad with joy …”
She was prostrate for a moment. After a long period of silence, she added:
“But I’d forgotten about the Slain Man.” That was all she said.
At 6:00 p.m., the police van took the twins to see the magistrate.
On the floor of Le Guen’s Cave, the police found two diving suits and some oxygen cylinders. If Thomas and Christine Autran had managed to kill de Palma and Sylvie Maurel, they would have got away via the underwater entrance. The next day, divers were sent down to explore. They discovered that the gateway had been opened and one of the concrete blocks moved aside.