9:19 A.M.
Aja! Aja!”
The captain finally wakes up. The faces of Christos and Morez are swaying in the sky, like bobble-headed angels. It takes Aja a few seconds to understand that she is the one who’s moving, lying in the hammock, the laptop having slid down her chest so that it looks as if she’s wearing an enormous silver medallion. Christos holds out a hand, and she grasps it. Carefully, she rolls out of the hammock.
“Any news?” the captain asks anxiously, checking her watch to see how long she’s been asleep.
Two hours and eighteen minutes. This seems both perfectly reasonable and far too long.
Morez is the first to reply.
“Yes and no. We’re not sure, in fact. That’s why we preferred to wake you. There’s been a report of a missing woman: Chantal Letellier, sixty-eight years old, lives on Rue des Maldives, in L’Ermitage. According to the friend she was staying with, she was just supposed to go back to her own house this morning, around 8 A.M., before meeting him at La Saline, with some other retired people. They belong to the same club, they play Go there. You know, the Chinese game? The club is called Go du Dodo. Seriously! Anyway, she still hasn’t arrived. They’ve been calling her house for the last thirty minutes, but no one’s answering the phone.”
Aja stretches, visibly disappointed. She touches her fingers to her face. She imagines her skin must be covered with little diamond-shaped lines from the cords of the hammock.
“Hmm, well . . . She’s probably stuck in a traffic jam. Or she’s fallen asleep. Is there any connection with Bellion?”
“Well, it’s shaky,” says Morez.
His eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep. He keeps blinking, as though his eyelids are being blown open and shut by the wind, like two bougainvillea petals.
“There is a connection, but it’s tenuous. Chantal Letellier lives very close to the Garden of Eden. Now, late last night, the receptionist there called us to report that a man and a girl who looked very much like Bellion and his daughter had visited the garden.”
Aja’s brain shifts into gear. She has slept for two hours, now she has to make up for lost time. Laroche’s extended deadline must be close to expiring. She has to find proof that Bellion has not been able to get through the roadblocks around Saint-Gilles before the ComGend opens the floodgates.
“Morez, did you take the call from the receptionist at the Garden of Eden?”
“Well, yes, but the girl didn’t sound too sure of herself. A father spotted with his daughter, two vague figures, that’s all she could tell us. The receptionist was a bit dopey, to be honest. We’ve had fifty similarly hazy reports since last night.”
Aja slaps her own cheeks to wake herself up. The harlequin wrinkles on her face begin to fade. Morez and Christos wait for her reaction. Suddenly Aja explodes.
“But fifty vague reports in the same location? That’s a fucking sign! Come on. Rue des Maldives, right? Let’s go!”
9:27 A.M.
Aja paces the empty living room. She savors the order, the slightly starchy, old-fashioned arrangement of the furnishings, the fleeting calm, well aware that in a few minutes the house will become a crime scene, and that every square inch of it, every piece of furniture, every knick-knack will be taken away and examined by an army of forensic scientists. She touches the wallpaper with her finger and takes a close look at Chantal Letellier’s photograph. The old woman has blue hair! She’s a character, no doubt about it. Her grandchildren must adore her.
Morez rushes in. His bulging eyeballs are now turning yellow and he is blinking as fast as a dragonfly’s wings.
“We’ve searched everywhere, Aja. There is blood all over the garage. On the ground. On the lawnmower, the tyres, on the sheets of tarpaulin. But there’s no sign of a body.”
“Jesus, what does that mean?”
Aja chews her lips.
Christos spent fifteen minutes on the phone with Chantal Letellier’s boyfriend, so they now have the beginnings of an explanation. Chantal Letellier lived on the island all year round, but spent most of her time at the house of this man, another retiree, a former doctor whom she met at the Go club in Saint-Paul. As her house was rarely lived in these days, Chantal Letellier decided to put it up for rent through a private website, excluding the times when her children and grandchildren came over to visit her. Bellion must have consulted a rental website, read the ad, thought that Chantal Letellier lived in France and her house was therefore empty.
And it was. Almost.
Before going to the Go club, as she did every morning, Chantal Letellier had dropped by her house around 8 A.M. This was unusual, but a neighbor had called the boyfriend’s house to say she’d forgotten to close her garage door. This had come as a surprise to her; she wasn’t losing her marbles yet, and she really thought she had closed that damned door. But with the story of a killer on the loose, she’d wanted to be sure.
Aja takes a picture off its hook on the wall. In this one, which is slightly blurred, Chantal Letellier is posing in front of the Voile de la Mariée waterfall.
Fate is sadistic. Chantal Letellier made the wrong choice. That open garage door was the clue that should have allowed them to catch Bellion. All it would have taken was a phone call to the police.
The captain sets the photograph down on the living room table. She is going to ask Morez to fax it to all the stations on the island. Just in case. As they haven’t yet found Chantal Letellier’s body, there is perhaps a slim chance that Bellion hasn’t killed her. That he has only taken her hostage.
Although with blood all over the garage, it’s a very slim chance.
At the moment, Aja has no DNA analysis and no fingerprints—the forensics team will take care of that—but all the evidence points the same way. They even found the butt of a joint in the bathroom. She has no doubt.
Martial Bellion and his daughter slept in this house last night.
She contacted Colonel Laroche a few minutes ago. The entire staff of the ComGend is being helicoptered to Saint-Gilles.
Their tails between their legs.
Aja was right all along. The fish had been caught in the net she had laid. She had almost hung up on Laroche after telling him this, so that he’d understand how much energy and time they had lost by his insistence that the manhunt should cover the whole island.
9:29 A.M.
Christos comes back into the room with a cynical, indifferent smile on his face: exactly the attitude that Aja hates in her second-in-command. She asks him, anxiously:
“Still no sign of Chantal Letellier’s body?”
“No, but I found something else.”
He holds up a plastic bag, then, without any explanation, empties the contents onto the living room table, right in front of Aja. For a few seconds, there is a cloud of hair in the air, then slowly it falls onto the table and the floor around it, making the living room tiles look like the floor of a hairdresser’s.
Long blonde hairs. Fine. Almost artificial.
As if some madman had shaved the heads of a hundred Barbie dolls.
Or maybe just one. A little Goldilocks.
Aja’s gaze turns once again to the framed photographs on the walls. This time, she doesn’t look at the grandmother, but at the six-year-old boy next to her, in his baseball cap and checked shirt, watching the crocodiles.
She understands.
“For God’s sake!” she suddenly screams. “They mustn’t get through!”