“Would you like some lemonade? Or maybe a little aperitif?” the woman offered.
“Please, don’t go to any trouble … whatever there is. A glass of water would be fine.”
The old woman opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Muscat and a jug filled with an orange-coloured concoction. She took two glasses from the cupboard and came and sat opposite him. Her movements were swift and precise. Vilar had been expecting a lonely, sad old lady, still traumatised by the murder; instead, he found a sprightly, resourceful woman who even managed to keep the heatwave at bay.
“Help yourself. I make the lemonade myself. I add a few drops of grenadine for colour. Personally, I prefer it with a dash of Beaumes de Venise.”
She poured a little wine, sniffed it, not taking her eyes off Vilar.
“One of your colleagues already questioned me,” she said as he was about to speak.
“I know. I read his notes. You were close friends with Nadia Fournier and her boy. That’s why I’m here to ask you a few more questions, in case there was anything you might not have remembered.”
Madame Huvenne nodded. “I was fond of Nadia. She was a good girl. And I wasn’t even there when … I was getting treatment for my legs. Maybe I could have … I don’t know … Maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
With the back of her hand, she wiped away a tear trickling down her cheek, turning the glass in the hollow of her hands, her head bowed. From somewhere in the house came the regular ticking of a clock. Otherwise all was silence. Vilar waited for her to speak, because he realised she needed to. Because this silence broken only by the swinging pendulum of the clock spoke of an aching solitude.
“I was really fond of her,” she said quietly, turning her calm, clear eyes on the police officer. “She was like family. And Victor was like my grandson. My children don’t live around here, I don’t see them much anymore, nor my grandchildren. And since my husband’s death … Yes, she was a good girl and I loved her, can you understand that?”
“Of course, but there are some things I don’t understand quite so well. That is, who Nadia really was, how she and Victor managed to get by. That’s why I wanted to come and see you here rather than bringing you down to the station.”
“Bring me in?
She set down her glass. Vilar could hear the panic in her voice. No hostility, no suspicion.
“Oh, there’s no need to worry. It’s something we always do if we feel a witness hasn’t told us the whole story. Normally they’re released the same day.”
She took a sip of wine, he sipped the cold, sugary lemonade that brought back childhood memories. Madame Huvenne looked him straight in the eyes, her hands flat on the table.
“What makes you think I didn’t tell the other officer the whole story?”
“There’s something strange about this case. Nothing quite fits. Nadia Fournier’s life finally seemed to have calmed down after all the upheavals in her childhood.” Madame Huvenne nodded, betraying no surprise, and Vilar was certain now that she knew more than she wanted to say. “Then suddenly she’s butchered in her own bedroom. And there was nothing stolen – this wasn’t a robbery that went wrong – there were no fingerprints, nothing. No D.N.A. we could use, she hadn’t had sex with her killer. She was naked, her clothes neatly folded – indicating that she undressed voluntarily, without being forced. This tells us that she knew the man who killed her.”
Madame Huvenne looked down and seemed to be studying the patterns on the tablecloth.
“Do you know how she made a living?” Vilar said.
“She cleaned offices and shops, at night. She worked for a company called S.A.N.I.”
“Do you have any idea what she earned?”
“Not much, I’d guess. I never really asked her, but in that line of work, they treat their staff like dogs. Officious little bosses employing people cash-in-hand. Desperate women who have to take whatever they can get so they can feed their kids. Exploited, like serfs in the Middle Ages. Job insecurity, they call it nowadays. The only right they have is to remain silent. There’s never any investigation into things like that. Think what Nadia and the other workers were earning, and then what their boss was pocketing. You should look into that, while you’re at it.”
“I already have. What she was earning at S.A.N.I. didn’t even cover her rent, especially since she only worked part-time.”
“What else could she do? That’s shift work for you. They won’t let you work more than twenty hours a week. She—”
“You talked to her about it? I thought you said you hadn’t. Funny … I think the two of you talked about a lot of things. Or am I mistaken?”
Madame Huvenne stared at him, suddenly winded.
“Why don’t you tell me how she managed to earn enough to live a decent life and afford to raise her son? I am sure you must have talked about that. It’ll save everyone a lot of time and it might help us catch the man who did this. I imagine you want to see him arrested?”
He had raised his voice and spoke in a more staccato tone. He took a small notebook from his pocket and poured himself more lemonade: he wasn’t thirsty, but it allowed him to maintain his status as a guest and subtly pressure the old woman without resorting to strong-arm tactics that might make her clam up. He deliberately set the jug down forcefully and saw her instinctively draw her head into her shoulders. He pulled his chair closer, the feet scraping across the tiles with a shriek that sounded menacing.
O.K., that should do it.
“I feel bad talking about her like this. It’s like I’m betraying her. She trusted me. Sometimes she’d cry and more than once I had to put my arms around her, try to calm her down. You’ve no idea how terribly miserable she was, and how sweet.”
“Tell me.”
The woman took a breath, then shook her head with a sigh.
Vilar did not take his eyes off her; he leaned towards her. It was entirely possible she might take out a photograph of the girl with her arms around her killer. She knew so much about Nadia Fournier’s life that she might well know the name of the man who had murdered her. Then he thought of Sandra de Melo, who had also been terrified of betraying Nadia. He jotted her name in a corner of the blank page in his notebook while Madame Huvenne drained her glass, sighed once more, and gently rubbed her hands, massaging the palm with her fingertips as though trying to crumple up a scrap of paper containing all her scruples and her qualms. It was not their affection and their friendship that made these women reluctant to talk. They were trying to protect Nadia.
“I don’t know where to start,” she said.
Vilar was about to suggest she told him how she and Nadia had met when the doorbell rang. The woman looked at him, alarmed. Then she got up, muttering to herself, wondering who it could possibly be. She stepped around the table, and as she passed him he caught the scent of her perfume, African violets, the smell stirred distant memories, of colours, the shade of a big tree in spring, but this hazy memory refused to crystallise.
From the hallway behind him, Vilar heard the lock click and the voice of a man apologising for disturbing her, explaining he was from the Electricité de France and had come to read the meter.
“I just had one of your lot here: are you coming every month, now?”
The man laughed, then his voice trailed off and he coughed.
“No, no. There was a problem with the readings. So we have to redo the whole street, see?”
When he saw Vilar, the man said hello, but the policeman did not respond, busy rereading the few notes he had made on his pad. At the back of the house, at the end of a long corridor, the old woman opened a cupboard door with a creak, explaining that she’d hardly used any electricity this last month. The meter reader cheerfully reassured her. There was a hoarseness to his voice, the chronic rasp of a smoker, perhaps. As they came past again, Vilar turned and looked at the meter reader, who looked away and did not say goodbye. He was tall, dark-haired, wearing a blue jacket with the E.D.F logo. He clutched a
spiral-bound notebook to his chest, a bit like a schoolboy. Vilar found the fact he seemed to hide the notebook strange, but he did not know why, then decided he did not care: he wanted the man gone so that he and Madame Huvenne could pick up where they left off.
The front door closed again. He could still hear the man coughing outside.
“Dearie me, he had a terrible smell of smoke on him,” the woman said, on as she came back into the kitchen. “Like he’d been sitting in his car chain-smoking for the past two hours.”
Vilar leapt to his feet so abruptly that his chair toppled over. He jumped over it and raced down the hallway, banging into the wall. He flung open the front door and there, thirty metres away, saw the so-called meter reader climbing into a black Ford Mondeo that was certainly not an E.D.F vehicle. He dashed down the empty street, yelling as he raced after the car, which sped away, ignoring his order to stop. He reached around to the small of his back, instinctively groping for the gun he no longer carried, that he had not carried for years now despite the statutory obligation and the repeated reminders from his superiors.
He stopped as he saw the car turn into the rue Blanqui, feeling the pistol butt, his missing gun, like a physical absence in his hand. He retraced his steps, struggling to catch his breath, wiping the sweat from his face, reciting the number plate to himself. He realised he could remember nothing about the man’s face: smooth, featureless, the eyes vacant, like the face in the nightmare that so often haunted his sleep.
Madame Huvenne was waiting on the doorstep. She looked up from under her spectacles as though to make sure he was unhurt, proposing she get him a glass of water, a chair, all the consolation she could offer.
“Dearie me,” she said, holding out a bottle of mineral water. “Dearie, dearie me … All these strange, violent men …”
She kept nodding, her shoulders hunched, her movements slow, suddenly much older. Vilar gulped water straight from the bottle, feeling a burning thirst he thought he might never quench. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, panting, his face flushed.
“Have you ever seen that man before?” he wheezed.
“Never, I swear to you.”
The old woman’s voice seemed about to crack.
“What is it? Please tell me, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know, but what I do know is that you’re going to have to talk to me, madame. I’ve had enough of your little secrets. This whole case is starting to stink. You need to get it into your head that Nadia was murdered, do you hear me? She was beaten and strangled. Do you have any idea what that means? You call yourself a friend, but with your silence you’re protecting the scum who did this.”
“Of course, of course,” the old woman said, brushing imaginary crumbs from the tablecloth.
She laid both hands on the table and sighed, then said something Vilar did not hear as he was fishing his phone from his pocket and stepping into the hall where he would not be overheard. He found himself standing in front of a door hidden behind a thick blue curtain, opened it and stepped through a sort of archway of wisteria which ran the length of the house. Bees buzzed around the flowers and, as he listened for Pradeau’s greeting, he watched their tireless but comforting ballet.
He explained what had just happened, asked Pradeau to pull the records for the car. It had probably been stolen, but right now it was their only lead so they had to follow it. From Vilar’s pauses, it was possible to intuit Pradeau’s questions and surprise.
“Yeah, black Ford Mondeo. And put a rocket up the arse of the guys at Licensing to run a vehicle check, please. Yes. It was him. I’m pretty sure I recognised the voice. I don’t know how. Maybe it was the hoarseness. The fucker’s voice has been ringing in my ear since the other night. Yeah, I’m sure … I saw his face, but I’m not sure I’d be able to pick him out of a line-up. But what can you do? He knew I’d be there, I’m sure of it. He didn’t turn up on the off chance. There’s something very weird going on. This guy is able to follow me, to second-guess my every move. Now I’m wondering what the fuck he was doing here. And it’s no coincidence: this means there’s a link between Morvan’s disappearance, the pictures I got the other night and the Nadia Fournier case, but I’m fucked if I know what it is. Yeah, obviously he’s got it in for me, but what does he want? What’s he after? Is he trying to get caught? He’s taking a hell of a risk playing games like this. Correct, I’m heading home as soon as I finish up here.”
He took a last look at the bees, thinking how nice it must be to sit in this garden of an evening, dismissed this ill-timed thought and walked back towards the kitchen. As he passed the living room, the unexpected sound of Madame Huvenne’s voice made him jump.
“Why don’t you come in here. We’ll be more comfortable. You’re quite right, I really should tell you everything I know.”
The room was dark. He saw the glowing timer of a video recorder and could just make out the old woman sitting in a huge armchair that seemed about to swallow her whole. Here and there he saw the gleam of furniture. Picture frames traced dark rectangles on the walls.
He sat on a sofa diagonally facing the armchair.
“You can turn on the light, if you want to take notes.”
He could barely see the woman in the big armchair and her voice seemed suddenly mysterious and anxious. It was no longer the clear, sprightly tone that had so surprised him when he first arrived. She sounded weaker now, breathless, she spoke more slowly, choosing her words carefully, it felt as though she were speaking from the dark shadows where all secrets lie.
He decided he preferred to listen in the dark, the better to hear every intonation, every quaver and every silence of the story she was about to tell, weaving a background murmur in which he might hear the whisper of truth.
This was how Pablo had liked him to tell stories, in a shadowy half-light where they could barely see each other. The sound of his son’s breathing, its cadence shifting according to the perilous tales Vilar invented, filled the night with a fragile sweetness that would all of a sudden be overtaken by easeful sleep.
Vilar was not about to let himself be lulled. He settled back and listened to the weary voice speaking softly in the darkness.
Nadia had arrived in tears, one afternoon in January, clutching her jacket around her, her T-shirt torn, trembling with cold and fear. Éric had been around again, but this time he had brought a friend, apparently for a quick drink. Éric wants to marry Nadia. For months he’s been pestering her about taking them abroad, her and Victor, taking them to Martinique where he’s been offered a job running a hotel. It was some mad idea he’d got into his head. In fact, the guy’s a loser, never has a penny to his name, he practically lives on the street. As for Martinique, well, Nicole never believed it, it was just another hare-brained scheme – how could Éric manage a hotel when he could barely cope with the small change in his pocket? But Éric seemed to genuinely believe everything he told her, every future he promised her, always a different one; he used to say that he wanted to get away, to turn his life around. If she made fun of him, he would get angry and abusive, screaming that she’d die in the gutter and her son with her. Then he would get violent, he would smash things or beat her. As the old woman talked, Vilar pictured the scene. Anyway, the day I mentioned, he shows up with a friend and she serves them pastis, and they drink, but Nadia is keeping an eye on the other man, the one she’s never seen before, a short dark-haired guy and there’s something tired and sad about him, a bit like Droopy – you know, the dog in the cartoons – and at some point Éric asks Nadia if she’s changed her mind about Martinique, so she plays dumb, she laughs, says it’s too hot over there and what with all the pretty girls he would end up dumping her and her kid. Éric sighs, he’s disappointed, as he is every time, and tells Nadia that if that’s how it is, she has to make amends, and he nods to his friend, “Do what you like,” he tells his friend, “And you, you little slut, you better play nice with him because otherwise I’m really going to get angry and you
know what I’m like when I lose my rag.” But Nadia refuses, she stares at Droopy and laughs and that’s when it kicks off, the punching and the kicking, then they drag her into the bedroom and have their fun, they force her to do all kinds of filthy things and as they leave, Éric tells her he’ll be back and that he won’t be making the journey for nothing.
“No …” Madame Huvenne answers a question Vilar did not ask. “Nadia never told me why this Éric was such a danger to her. He had something on her, but she never said what it was. A hundred times I tried to get her to tell me; it was something she’d seen, something she knew, something she had no business knowing, but she never told me more than that. But yes, she was afraid. She said Éric was dangerous, said he was twisted, that he enjoyed hurting people. It wasn’t her in particular, apparently that was the first time he’d got so angry, though thinking back he was obviously trying to pressure her. Most of the time it was just threats, they would argue at night in her bedroom after … well, you know, he was a regular, I suppose, so she put up with it. It was a habit … Once or twice she mentioned some people he knew, talked about how she felt caught in the crossfire … She was trying to keep a low profile, trying to make sure social services and Victor’s school didn’t notice anything. I think that’s why he’s such a good student, so gentle, almost too quiet, according to his teachers … I think that apart from … how can I put it? … aside from her activities – whoring, she used to call it, she wasn’t proud, she said, but she wasn’t ashamed because she’d sunk so low she had no shame left. That’s exactly how she put it. Anyway, apart from that, I think she was mixed up in something that meant that in every other part of her life she had to be perfect, you know? And her son was just the same, he had to behave perfectly so he wouldn’t be taken into care. They lived on a knife edge. Victor talked to me about it once. There was this boy in his class who lived with foster parents, he’d been taken away from his mother because she didn’t look after him properly, he was always missing school and misbehaving, and Victor was completely terrified that he would be taken away, that he and his mother would be separated, the poor thing. And now …”
Talking to Ghosts Page 18
