Today, at the petrol station, I got up the nerve to tell my family that I didn’t even have enough money to fill up the car. Given that we were about to go off on our holidays, it didn’t go down well.
Want to kill
With my 20 euros, I was able to pump 11.78 litres all over the ground. Then I dropped my cigarette.
Convicted: 176
Acquitted: 324
www.want-to-kill.com
The lighthouse on the Cap de la Hève illuminated the cliff precisely every twelve seconds.
Vasily had counted each second in his head. He had a powerful torch, strong enough to light up the viewing area and to roam over the chalky grassed area at the top of the cliff, but not strong enough to illuminate the foreshore below or the ink-black sea.
Twelve seconds.
Vasily aimed his flashlight at the Guzzi he’d parked between two white benches, on the edge of the empty parking lot. An icy wind took his breath away. Not violent enough to knock over the motorbike, which stood on its kickstand, but too strong to allow him to check his map one more time. Instead he just visualized the circles of color in his head, the lines and arrows, all the slow and patient work he’d done cross-checking clues.
He’d bought a new map earlier that afternoon, copied out the results of his previous theories, then spent a good part of the day listening to Gouti’s stories, over and over again, through headphones, holding felt-tip pens, often pausing the stories and rewinding them, going back over the differences, the evidence, in order to isolate the place that best matched the majority of Malone’s memories. The smallest common denominator, Vasily thought, moving through the dark junipers.
This place. Here.
In this jungle of brambles that clawed at the sleeves of his leather jacket an almost brand-new Bering. Probably ruined already.
What the hell was he doing here?
The image of the death threat flashed in his mind—the tomb on the cliff—as frequently and regularly as the blinding glare of the lighthouse.
He walked slowly and carefully. His flashlight only had a reach of about three meters and the grass was slippery. He had no desire to have to grab hold of the thorny branches to stop himself falling.
He tried to push away the reasonable voices whispering to him that he should turn back, get on his bike and speed back towards the lights of the city. It helped to think about Malone.
Malone, feeling lost on the step outside his classroom, terrified, shivering, incapable of walking through the slightest drizzle, of being touched by the last few drops of a rain shower.
Vasily had promised himself he would take a look, check it out. If his intuition proved correct, if all the elements were in place, he would not come back, not even in broad daylight. He would simply call Marianne Augresse, and the accumulated weight of the evidence would oblige her to come, to get involved.
The flashlight’s beam flickered over the bushes. Through the tangle of branches, he found it hard to tell where the plateau ended and the abyss began. For an instant, he imagined that if he fell here, stupidly, in this inaccessible part of the coastline, no one would find him for days. Not until his corpse had been carried away by the ocean currents and washed up somewhere along the estuary, on a beach, against one of the quays of the port, embalmed in salt and oil and mummified in plastic bags.
This time, it was the image of Angie that helped him to push back these morbid thoughts. The desire to send her a text. To reassure her. To reassure himself. As soon as he got home, she was supposed to join him at the apartment in the Résidence de France. He wouldn’t be gone long, he’d told her. Just five kilometers each way on his bike.
The whooshing sound made by the departing message broke the silence. Vasily checked the time.
10:20 P.M.
The seagulls were asleep. The sea seemed to whisper.
Twelve seconds.
The great beam of light crossed the undergrowth, dazzled Vasily, then continued on its way north, briefly lighting up the beach at low tide.
Four towers. In a line.
Malone’s castle!
Vasily’s heart sped up. He’d been right.
The light continued circling. It was coming back to him already. The psychologist narrowed his eyes, concentrated, staring at the sea, which sparkled gold as in a brief, intermittent sunset.
The pirate ship.
Black.
Cut in two.
Vasily tried to control his excitement.
The next flash would light up the strange houses and then, behind them, the bare wall.
Shadows? Ogres?
Was it possible to live there?
Could Malone really have lived there?
Wasn’t he following a trail of clues that had been deliberately left for him, using a child’s brain, like some soft version of the Rosetta stone?
He stayed there for a while, attempting to measure exact distances, to calculate the number of kilometers separating this spot from the airport, from Mont-Gaillard, from Manéglise. He realized that locating this place would not make much difference without the support of the police. Without a letter rogatory to search, one by one, these huts from beyond the grave. Maybe the ghost of Malone’s mother would still be there, and with it the secret of his birth?
He waited a good fifteen minutes before heading back to his motorbike. In the end, he found a clearer path that enabled him to avoid the brambles. His flashlight illuminated a circle of ashes littered with three cans of beer and a dozen cigarette butts. A few other traces of life, clandestine and ephemeral.
He was close to the parking lot, which was half-concealed behind the last line of junipers, when he heard a message arrive on his phone.
Angie.
Seven words, full of mistakes.
Be carful. Im wating 4 u. Kiss
Vasily felt an inner warmth enveloping him, like a sweet energy driving a silent engine, a wonder of technology that accelerated his heart, his footsteps, his desire to reach Boulevard Clemenceau as quickly as possible, to be wrapped in Angie’s arms once more.
Falling in love with a hairdresser . . . And yet that was what was happening to him.
His eyes lingered for a moment on the photograph of Angie displayed on the screen of his mobile phone.
He smiled as he kept walking.
Sea fennel and sea kale crunched under his boots.
His smile froze.
His thumb pressed against the phone to make Angie vanish into darkness.
The Guzzi was lying on the ground.
Like a dead animal left there on the tarmac: that was the first image that popped into Vasily’s mind. He rushed over. The wind gusted against his back, making his jacket swell, but it wasn’t strong enough to have knocked over a three-hundred-kilogram motorbike.
Dim light from a street lamp, a hundred meters away, vaguely illuminated the scene. Vasily bent over the Guzzi, assessing the damage. Theories flooded through his brain.
Was it an accident? A threat? Some guy who had deliberately run his car into the bike? No, Vasily would have heard the noise. And there would be traces of the impact. A man, then? Who’d come alone, silently? But why?
Vasily looked again at the bike’s chrome bodywork. There was no smell of petrol. No dents. The bike did not seem any more scratched by the tarmac than his jacket had been by the brambles.
He breathed slowly, giving his heart time to go back to its normal rhythm. He probably just hadn’t set the kickstand properly, hadn’t paid attention to the slope of the ground. Because of his fear, because he was rushing. Idiot! He wasn’t made for this kind of adventure. He should pass the baton on to the police as soon as he could, he thought. Then join Angie.
Love her.
Give her a child.
That was the last image that came to his mind. The child had no face.
And then there was darkness.
The smell. The pain.
Vasily had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.
A few minutes? More than an hour?
The pain was searing, from his cervical vertebrae all the way down to his lower back, but it was nothing compared to the terrible weight that was crushing his legs. Three hundred kilograms. Grinding his knees and tibias in a vice of chrome and metal. Vasily had tried, in vain. It was impossible to move the Guzzi.
Caught in a trap. His helmet had rolled onto the parking lot, a few meters away.
Vasily put his hands flat against the handlebars and pushed again. All he had to do was move the bike a few centimeters and he’d be able to slide out. And the pain would be less intense, at least, while he waited for someone to rescue him.
He took a deep breath.
The smell of petrol was inhaled deep into his lungs. Like an invisible acid cloud burning everything in its path. Throat. Windpipe. Thoracic cage.
He coughed. That was another reason he had to get out. He was lying in a pool of petrol. Most of the thirty litres from his tank, probably. He’d filled the bike up at the 24-hour petrol station in Mont-Gaillard before he came here.
He closed his eyes and slowly counted to twenty, taking the time to relax his muscles—biceps, triceps, and deltoids—before tensing them again and pushing the Guzzi with all the strength he had left.
He would repeat this sequence until he was completely exhausted. Until dawn if necessary.
He couldn’t just lie there, like a pinned butterfly.
He inhaled deeply, despite the stench of the petrol, then held his breath.
Opened his eyes.
Push . . .
At first Vasily thought it was a star, or the red lights of a plane against the black sky, or some strange luminescent insect.
It took him some time to understand, because he couldn’t see anything other than that light.
His nostrils quivered first. Because of the smoke. And maybe because they scented danger.
It wasn’t a star, or a bug, or a beacon on a plane, or a rocket.
Just the glowing red end of a cigarette. In the mouth of an almost invisible man, standing a few meters away from him.