Rosy and John

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Camille looks at his watch and laughs.

  “Which will take, what? an hour?”

  Louis reckons at least two, but they agree it will be swift. Camille’s brief is simply to do the spadework. After that, he will be sidelined; but he does not envy his successor, this case stinks to high heaven.

  For the time being, however, fifteen other officers have been seconded to his team. Louis has been busy been putting them in the picture. By the time Camille arrives, they know why they are there. As soon as he comes into the room, the chattering stops. He usually has this effect, his theatrical smallness, his gleaming bald pate, but especially his eyes, a look that is sharp as a blade. And he can be theatrical: in the gravest circumstances, he is a man of few words. And so everyone falls silent; he marks a pause for a few seconds. A little melodramatic, perhaps, but no-one objects. Everyone here knows him, they know about his past, his wife, the depression, his enforced sabbatical and his return . . . Verhœven is little short of legendary.

  He succinctly describes the self-professed culprit while Louis hands out the case summary he has typed up, precise, well-argued, impeccable.

  “If Garnier is telling the truth,” says Camille, “a second bomb should explode in the next twenty-four hours. And since the incident on the rue Joseph-Merlin was no joke, we need to take the threat very seriously.”

  He might have added something momentous like “The first bomb resulted in no fatalities, that in itself is a miracle. It is our job to deal with the second . . .”, but contrary to what Garnier believes, reality has very little in common with cop shows.

  Camille simply offers a warning:

  “I don’t know yet how the authorities will decide to manage the affair, but in the meantime, there must be no communication with the media or with anyone else for that matter. I shouldn’t have to remind you, this is a tight-knit team . . .”

  He allows a silence to ripple through the room, one that everyone present clearly understands: anyone who leaks information will be in deep shit.

  But Camille is under no illusions. The media are baying for blood, the fact that Jean Garnier surrendered himself will leak before long; expecting a secret of this magnitude to be kept is sheer fantasy.

  “I want you to comb through Jean Garnier’s past, his friends, his relatives, etc. And especially what he was doing yesterday, the day before yesterday and the day before that, who he saw, who he bumped into, any contact he had within the neighbourhood. We’re aiming to retrace his movements over the past few weeks.”

  Camille decides on the teams, apportions responsibilities, and concludes:

  “Louis Mariani will be coordinating the investigation, anything that turns up – anything – goes through him. Right, good luck.”

  Then he makes his way through the canteen to meet with the juge.

  Louis immediately gathers the various teams together, the officers jostle and heckle. In his elegant Armani suit, he may look like a princeling, but he is astonishingly efficient. He responds to their queries calmly and precisely, he looks as though he could parry questions all night without breaking a sweat.

  Twenty minutes later, everyone has disappeared and Louis has retired to the Comms room, ready to take calls from the officers out in the field, sift through the information, pin images and information to the corkboard, write progress reports for the divisionnaire, the juge and Camille.

  9.10 p.m.

  Camille spent the whole journey clutching his seatbelt. It was impossible to think, what with the flashing lights and sirens. The driver is a boy racer who didn’t see the need to hit the brakes more than one or twice between Paris and Bagnolet.

  But Camille was insistent in his orders and so, a few minutes from Jean’s house, the lights and sirens are switched off, the convoy slows and allows Verhœven’s car to move in front; the forensics team will work discreetly, no need to panic the whole neighbourhood, they need to move quickly but quietly.

  The housing estate where Rosie and Jean Garnier live is a drab collection of buildings. Considered poor in the 1970s, it was deemed middle class a decade later and these days, tenanted by thirtysomethings, millenials and middle managers, it aspires to the status of a “gated community”. And in fact, that is what people are supposed to call it. Not housing estate, but gated community. There are no plebs here.

  Number 21 is the first building on the left. There are cars everywhere. The estate was not built for thirtysomething environmentalists who love their hybrids, and so the police cars are forced to double-park. Camille waves them on, go and wait down there. But though they try to be discreet, as soon as they arrive at the door, they hear footsteps echoing in the concrete stairwell, as neighbours appear, four of them, then five, perched on the stairs like chickens, waiting for someone to summon the nerve to go and find out what is going on. They whisper amongst themselves, everyone has heard something, everyone has an opinion. Camille asks a colleague to go and interview them, to ask them what they think about their neighbours, obviously they are overjoyed . . .

  Camille steps inside, and two officers and two forensics technicians run into the apartment.

  The blinds are drawn, various plants have been placed in the bathtub which is half filled; upended plastic bottles have been pushed into the pots of those plants that are easily overwatered. The place is spick and span, the unplugged fridge is empty, the door left open, the beds are made, the wardrobes neat, the floors have been meticulously vacuumed. The air is thick with the smell of all-purpose household detergent, furniture polish and the whole arsenal of retail industrial cleaning products.

  The furniture is old, but in very good condition: in the living room, there is a teak table with matching chairs that might have been fashionable thirty years ago, a sideboard in which the best china is carefully arranged. On the glass shelves of a display cabinet, there are rows of ornaments, horses made from spun glass, holiday souvenirs, a doll in traditional dress whose country of origin Camille cannot work out. In the modest bookcase, there are cheap book club editions, faux-leather with gilt embossed titles (Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, Great Battles of France, Secrets of the Knights Templar . . .) not one of which has ever been opened. While the forensics officers go through the cupboards, Camille takes a look at Rosie’s room. The bed is crowded with soft toys of the kind you might win at a funfair, all seemingly awaiting her return. On the floor, a bedside rug in fake fur. An astonishing number of Harlequin romances are carefully lined up on a shelf (Guilty Passion, The Bridge to Happiness, One Night of Magic . . .) As he leaves the room, Camille pauses to study a suitcase one of the officers has just taken from the wardrobe. The contents smell of memories. Camille casts a quick eye over it.

  “Bag all this up for me,” he says.

  Jean’s room: football posters on the walls, a vast library of video games and horror movies. Here, too, everything is perfectly arranged, there is not a thing out of place.

  The apartment belongs to the local Affordable Housing Association. With Jean Garnier under arrest, within two months it will be cleared out and offered to a new family, everything here will end up in a skip. Whether the tenants were planning to come back or whether they had left for good seems immaterial; either way, the apartment was perfectly prepared for a police raid.

  The prospect that Jean Garnier has planted six more bombs primed to go off seems suddenly more credible.

  9.45 p.m.

  Initial witness statements give the impression of a young man who was timid but always ready to lend a hand.

  “He used to come round and do D.I.Y.,” according to a neighbour (she is fat, fifty, potbellied and priggish). “Replace a tap, rewire a plug, that kind of thing, anything to make a little money . . . He wasn’t exactly the talkative type, yes ma’am, no ma’am, that was about the extent of his conversation. You wouldn’t invite him round for a chat. But a nice lad. Wouldn’t harm a fly.”

  *

  “As far as flies go, I’m with you,” says Camille, “Not a single fl
y died on the rue Joseph-Merlin.”

  The young man handcuffed to the steel table is exhausted. He was officially charged two hours ago, and in those two hours, he has endured a barrage of questions from a series of officers working in ten- to fifteen-minute shifts.

  While Camille was meeting with his superiors, the colleagues who took over roughed Jean up a little. He is clutching his stomach, there is a large bruise on his left cheek, a deep gash on his forehead, he is having trouble breathing. “He had a fall in the corridor,” they told Camille.

  When it comes to terrorist offences, the police have a wide range of legal weapons at their disposal, there is no maximum period of custody, it can drag on for half a century. The officers take advantage of the rules: Jean will not be seeing his lawyer any time soon. Not that it matters, Jean says he doesn’t want one.

  “Mind telling us why?” Camille asks.

  “Don’t need one. You give me what I want, I’ll give you what you want, job done. Otherwise, hundreds of people will die and I’ll get life without parole. I don’t see how a lawyer could help . . .”

  He strokes his cheek.

  “Your colleagues got a bit heavy-handed, but you need me if you’re going to find the other bombs, so . . .”

  The gesture stops Camille in his tracks.

  “Because Jean is fine. He’s more than fine, given the circumstances.”

  Over the course of his career, Camille has seen his fair share of police brutality, he has seen a suspect’s every possible reaction, and what alarms him in this case is that Jean has been badly beaten but behaves as though it were the most normal thing in the world, as though he has been expecting it, anticipating the reaction of the police.

  How much has he anticipated?

  He seems astonishingly broody and sullen for a man capable of devising such an elaborate plan.

  Is there something not quite right here?

  *

  “John Garnier,” Camille reads aloud. “Semi-professional footballer, diploma in electromechanical engineering. Known to be a good handyman. Odd jobs . . . Short periods of unemployment.”

  Jean has a face that marks easily. The bruise is already beginning to turn purple. Camille scans the file in front of him, then looks up, admiringly.

  “So you still live with your mother. At the age of twenty-seven.”

  Jean does not respond to this remark

  “‘Father unknown’ . . . come on, Jean, tell me a little about that.”

  “‘Father unknown’ means I never knew my father, what do you want me to say?”

  “Yes, but that’s just something they put on your birth certificate. What I’m interested in is what Rosie told you.”

  “He didn’t want anything to do with me, that’s his right.”

  Without realising, Garnier has raised his voice. He must have said this same sentence hundreds of times in the past twenty-seven years, that sort of pat answer designed to avoid the truth, to make it easier not to think about it, to overcome the problem.

  “You’re spot-on,” Camille says. “That is his right.”

  Anyone who did not know Verhœven would think he was being sincere. Silence.

  “He couldn’t marry my mother,” Jean says, his voice calmer now. “He wanted to but he couldn’t, so he went abroad. That’s all.”

  *

  “Madame Garnier and her son? They argued a lot . . .”

  This from the upstairs neighbour, she lives alone and has numerous cats. A suspicious woman. Unlike the others, who were only too happy to get their pictures in the paper, she refused to open her door until she had telephoned the commissariat to verify the officer’s identity. Even then, she would not allow the female officer across the threshold.

  “Do you have any idea what they argued about?”

  “Everything, nothing. Every day they were at it! Well, almost every day . . . I must have gone down and banged on their door a dozen times, but they never answered. The next day, she’d set off to work like nothing had happened. As for him, he never so much as said ‘good morning’. Smashing crockery and slamming doors and calling each other every name under the sun until all hours!”

  She shakes her head as though she were shocked just listening to herself. Then she closes the door.

  “At least since she’s been in prison we’ve had a bit of peace in the building.”

  *

  “You and your mother couldn’t stand each other,” Camille says, “so it’s strange that you would be happy to plant seven bombs to get her released. Since you been here, you haven’t even asked to see her . . . I’m sorry, Jean, but your story just doesn’t make sense.”

  “You don’t have to make sense of it,” Jean says without looking up. “You just let us go and I’ll tell you where the shells are planted.”

  Camille catches him glancing at the wall clock.

  “So the next bomb, what time is it set to go off tomorrow?”

  Jean breaks into a thin-lipped smile.

  “You’re making a mistake taking me for a fool. You’ll change your tune, just wait and see.”

  *

  He is offered nothing to eat, he asks for nothing; he has not touched the bottle of water and the glass in front of him. He stares at the floor, he already has the ashen pallor of a suspect approaching the end of his tether, but he is holding up.

  Camille leafs through the case file of his mother, Rosie Garnier.

  Two years ago, Jean fell in love with Carole Wendlinger, a twenty-three year old from Alsace. She dreams of going back there. He dreams of Carole. They decide to go together.

  “I totally get it,” Camille says suddenly.

  Carole looks pretty in the photograph, with her ash-blonde hair, her broad smile, her blue eyes.

  *

  Marie-Christine Hamrouche, forty years old, Rosie’s colleague and her best friend. She gave a statement on the day Rosie was arrested and probably testified at her trial, but she enjoys telling this story, she never tires of it.

  “You have to understand, Rosie was always complaining about her son . . . Not a day went by that they didn’t have a quarrel, a shouting match, it was never-ending. He would never do the shopping, but if she didn’t bring back exactly what he wanted, he’d blow his top. They were always at each other’s throats, about what was on television, about his dirty laundry, the plants that needed watering, the jobs that needed doing around the house, the overflowing ashtrays . . . Every day it was something different. I used to say to her, to listen to you, you’d be better off with a husband, at least he’d bring home his pay packet.”

  The officer nods sagely, thinking about his own wife.

  “And as for Jean, if you wanted to get him to do a hand’s turn you had to get up early. So when he met that girl of his, we all hoped it would work out for them. I swear, when he said he was moving away with her, Rosie was delighted. You’d think she was the one who’d had a wedding proposal. It was a relief . . . As much for us as for her, I have to say, her colleagues I mean, because Rosie and her son were so wound up that sooner or later things were bound to end badly . . .”

  She trails off. At this point in the story, words always fail her, she looks at the officer, her eyes wide.

  “So when we heard the news, well, I tell you we were shocked.”

  “So let me get this straight, Jean” Camille says. “And correct me if I’m wrong. You and your mother fight like cat and dog, but even though she bitches about you all the time, the thought of losing you, of being on her own, is too much for her to bear. No-one knows exactly how it happens, but I’m guessing that she resists, she cries, she stamps her feet, but since this gets her nowhere, since you’re determined to stick with Carole, she pretends to give up, she’s secretly seething and one night, as your girlfriend is coming home after her shift at the supermarket, your mother runs her over with the car. Killed outright. Your little Carole dreamed of the Alsace of her childhood, and now she’s pushing up daisies in the cemetery in Pantin. Your mother hides
the car. A month later, there’s a bizarre combination of circumstances, a fire breaks out in the basement in the middle of the day, and since the owners are not around, firefighters break open a number of the locked garages and find the car. End of story. Is that about right, Jean?”

  It’s hard to tell whether or not Jean is listening, he looks more like a man waiting for a train.

  “When your mother is arrested, you’re hauled in for questioning . . . Hardly surprising – the car used to murder your girlfriend has been found in the family lock-up, that makes you look like the perfect accomplice, but the juge doesn’t hold it against you; you never use the car, they never find your fingerprints inside, and anyway you and Carole were planning to take off together, so they’re hardly likely to think you were involved in her murder . . .”

  Jean does not flicker an eyelash.

  “Except that now, everything has changed. Because you’re trying to get your mother set free. Obviously, you’re not one to hold a grudge, so you’ve got that in your favour. But in hindsight, it sheds new light on Carole’s death. And it’s likely to put you back in the frame, because the idea that you were somehow complicit, well, the juge is going to love that.”

  Jean stares at the wall and sighs, irritated that he is forced to repeat himself.

  “If I set off six more bombs in the middle of the city, it’s hardly going to make much difference.”

  “But your mother killed your girlfriend, Jean! Why are you so determined to defend her?”

  “Because it’s not fair!” Jean screams. “She acted on impulse!”

  He falls silent, as though he is sorry that he got carried away, that he revealed something so private.

  “What I mean is . . . it’s not her fault.”

  The pressure subsides, but in those few seconds Camille got a glimpse of something crucial, something that may well explain Jean Garnier’s behaviour: his anger. A rage that, like his mother’s rage on the day she went out and ran Carole down, flared into fury. Except that in Jean’s case, he choked back his rage. And it gave birth to a grisly plan, a cold, calculating plan to sow terror. Garnier is out of his depth.