4:02 P.M.
The sun hangs above the swimming pool like a huge halogen bulb fastened there for eternity. The neat jungle of palm trees and octopus bushes, cloistered by three high teak walls, protects the enclosed space from even the faintest breath of wind. You can guess at the ocean’s presence from the tropicbirds flying above, the cooling influence of the distant trade winds. But in the garden of the Hotel Athena, the heat beats down on the square of lawn and the few tourists escape it by diving into the chlorinated water then lying on the deckchairs lined up in shady corners.
“I’m going to see what Liane’s doing.”
Martial levers himself up from the pool with his arms. Gabin sees him approaching. Liane’s husband isn’t bad either, it has to be said, with his muscular legs, his six-pack, his broad shoulders. He looks like a PE teacher, or a fireman, or a soldier, one of those professions where you’re paid to spend your days pumping iron. Perfectly tanned too, in contrast to his wife’s milky skin. Less than a week they’ve been here, and already he looks like a Cafre3 . . . The handsome Martial must have a drop of black blood, just the tiniest chromosome from a slave ancestor, a dormant pigment that only needs a bit of sunlight to allow it to percolate through, the way a single drop of Blue Curaçao can color a cocktail.
As the tourist moves towards the bar, Gabin watches the water running down his hairless chest. Martial and Liane Bellion make a beautiful couple, playing at lazing around in the tropics. Sexy and rich. Good for them, thinks Gabin. Win-win. The happiness of wealthy white lovers is fundamental to commerce in destinations that are supposedly paradise.
Their bizness . . .
Martial is standing in front of him.
“Gabin, has my wife come back down?”
“No, sorry, I haven’t seen her . . .”
Gabin glances at the clock behind him. It is exactly an hour since Liane went upstairs. And one thing’s for sure: if her sweet little ass had wandered back into his line of vision, he would have remembered. Martial turns around, and walks a few feet towards the bodies splashing around in the pool.
“Margaux, can you look after Sopha? I’m going to see what Liane’s doing.”
Gabin registers every detail of the scene with a precision he is not, at that moment, aware of. The exact time on the clock. The position of those around him, in the water, sitting on the edge of the pool, or lying back in deckchairs. The police will make him repeat his description ten times, sketching the scene just to be sure. Not once will he contradict himself.
Margaux, swimming lengths in the pool, barely even looks up. Margaux is half of another couple; the wife of Jacques, the lawyer who is sitting reading on his deckchair. Or sleeping.
“You know, Captain Purvi,” Gabin will say apologetically, “it’s hard to tell when they’re wearing sunglasses . . .”
Margaux and Jacques Jourdain are a less glamorous couple than Liane and Martial, and at least ten years older. More annoying, too. He spends most of his time on the computer in the lobby, reading his emails, while she just swims from one end of the pool to the other. She swims for kilometers. Given that the pool is twelve meters long, that’s a frightening number of lengths. Worse than a tailless tenrec4 caught under a crate by kids in Les Hauts. The Jourdains are bored shitless, even in the tropics. Gabin doesn’t want to imagine what they must be like in Paris . . .
Sopha is Liane and Martial’s daughter. Well, Sopha is what they call her; her real name is Josapha. In the pool, she whimpers as though she might actually sink, even with those Dora the Explorer water wings around her arms. Gabin spotted the little blonde girl’s tyrannical temperament on the very first day, as if the kid had decided her sole duty during this holiday was to ruin it for her parents. She’s gifted, or something like that. Barely six years old and already blasé. How many Parisian girls of her age have ever swum in eighty-five-degree water under the shade of casuarina trees, with fluorescent coral and clownfish slipping between their toes?
While Gabin pontificates to himself about this spoiled only child, Martial has slipped into the hotel.
4:05 P.M.
All Naivo can remember seeing is Martial Bellion’s back as he stood in front of the lift. He must have been looking elsewhere when Bellion came through the lobby, or was immersed in his accounts. But it was definitely him, no doubt about it. Same swimming trunks, same back, same hair. It won’t be easy to explain this to the police, but yes, it is perfectly possible to recognize a man from behind.
4:06 P.M.
“It’s all right, go ahead, that bit’s O.K. !” Eve-Marie shouts at Martial, who hesitates at the sight of the spotlessly clean tiles. “It’s dry!”
Through the immaculate windows on the second floor, Martial glances down at the hotel garden. Sopha is sitting at the edge of the pool, alone. Margaux looks up at her every three strokes. Martial sighs, then walks over towards number 38.
He knocks softly on the dark wooden door. He waits. Knocks again. After a few seconds, he turns around and explains to Eve-Marie, who has not said a word:
“My wife has the keys . . . I don’t think she can hear me. I’m going to ask the guy at reception to open it for me . . .”
Eve-Marie shrugs. What does she care? The floor’s dry now.
Martial returns a few moments later, flanked by Naivo, who plays Saint Peter with a massive bunch of keys chiming at his wrist. Eve-Marie rolls her eyes. It’s like a carnival in her corridor this afternoon! Naivo is a methodical man: the first key he inserts in the lock opens the door to number 38.
Martial goes in. Naivo stands on the threshold, a meter behind him.
The room is empty.
Martial takes another step forward, disoriented.
“I don’t understand. Liane should be here . . .”
Naivo puts a hand on the door frame. A shiver runs through his arm. Something is wrong here: he sensed it instantly. While Martial scans the room’s few recesses, Naivo’s eyes fix on every detail. The double bed, with the fuchsia duvet rolled in a ball. The scattered clothes. The cushions and the remote control on the carpet. The white glass vase knocked off the roble-wood shelf. All clues pointing to a violent domestic quarrel.
Or to a passionate fuck between consenting lovers, thinks Naivo, forcing himself to be more positive.
Frantic, Martial opens the bathroom door.
Nobody there.
Not in this room, or anywhere else. There is no balcony, no space under the bed in which she could hide, no cupboard with doors that close, only wooden shelving.
Martial sits on the bed, looking devastated, lost. And yet, bizarrely, Naivo does not believe him. He won’t really know how to express this to the police, but something in Bellion’s reaction does not seem natural. He will simply describe the scene to Captain Purvi, describe this handsome, self-assured, forty-year-old father collapsing like a child when he found the room empty. This playboy in his trunks sitting like a statue on the edge of the bed. Perhaps that was what struck him as surreal in the moment it happened. The contrast . . .
The contrast . . . and the red stains . . .
Sweat pours down Naivo’s forehead.
Red stains on the bedsheet.
Naivo stares. A dozen other red stains are spread across the beige carpet, around the bed, near the window, on the curtains. He falls silent. All he can see now is a room splattered with blood.
Indecision.
The moment seems to stretch, though in reality it lasts no more than a few seconds. Martial stands up, silent, and stalks around the room, throwing the clothes from the bed as if searching for an explanation, a note, some kind of clue. Naivo senses Eve-Marie staring over his shoulder. She has walked towards them, cloth in hand so she has an excuse. The cloth is the same turquoise color as the scarf she wears in her hair.
Martial stands up straight and finally speaks, in a toneless voice, as he picks up the vase and puts it back on the wooden shelf.
“I don’t understand. Liane should be here . . .”
Naivo’s gaze alights on the clothes he has thrown in a pile at the foot of the bed. T-shirts, cropped trousers, shirts.
All of them men’s clothes!
Immediately, a door opens inside Naivo’s brain, and a breeze blows through, sweeping away his morbid theories.
The girl has run away . . .
He could testify as an expert witness: Liane Bellion wears a different dress practically every hour of the day. You’d have thought her Corsair flight was accompanied by a cargo ship full of her clothes that were unloaded at the port. And yet, in this ravaged apartment, there is not a single trace of any lace knickers, frilled skirts or pareos, any skintight tops or low-cut camisoles . . .
Naivo is breathing more easily. He has forgotten about the blood.
“I don’t believe it,” Martial hisses, examining once more the two square meters of the bathroom.
“Monsieur Bellion,” says Naivo, “can I do anything?”
Martial turns on his heel and speaks quickly, as if he had prepared his response in advance, learned it by heart.
“Call the police! My wife should be in this room. She came up here an hour ago. She didn’t come back down.” He slams the bathroom door and says: “So yes, you can do something. Get me the police.”
Ever the professional, Naivo suppresses a worried frown. Calling the police to the hotel . . . The boss is not going to be happy about that. Between the chik5 and the thousand-euro-plus cost of a flight from Paris, tourism is already suffering here. So the idea of having the police walking round the swimming pool, of every guest being interrogated, of blue flashing lights . . . No, the boss is not going to like that at all. But what choice does he have?
“Of course, monsieur,” Naivo hears himself say. “I’ll go down now and call them.”
His eyes meet Eve-Marie’s, and a wordless flicker of understanding passes between them. Then he takes one last look at Martial. The man is prowling the room like a caged animal. The air conditioning is making all his muscles shiver, like a surfer lost on the Baltic Sea.
“You should put some clothes on, monsieur.”
He cannot tell if the guest has even heard him.
“This . . . this is not normal,” Martial Bellion whispers again. “Liane should have been here.”
3 A person from Réunion of African original.
4 A small hedgehog native to the island.
5 The chikungunya virus.