“I’ll come with you. I owe you that at least. There’s no knowing how they’ll react if they know you’re alone and working unofficially. Éric and I knew this guy back in the ’90s. He used to throw orgies down at Cap-Ferrat or at Pyla with a whole crowd of filthy rich scum, Éric must have told you.”
“Sandra de Melo already told me everything. And your fucking brother murdered her.”
“I know.”
“Yeah, you know. You’ve known everything from the start and here I am talking to you instead of putting a fucking bullet in your brain. I don’t know what’s happening anymore, what I’m doing standing around in the middle of the night with a couple of scumbags when my son might be somewhere nearby in God-knows-what state, Jesus fuck, I don’t get it. Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I couldn’t control him anymore. I knew that if you were sniffing around Nadia’s case you were bound to find out about the shit him and me had been mixed up in. And then he decided to fuck with your head with all that stuff about your son. He was crazy, he thought using Pablo was an way of pressuring you so you’d lose it altogether. There was nothing I could do.”
“You could have talked to me. We were friends, weren’t we? Isn’t that what they call it?”
“I would have had to tell you all this, and there was no way I could do that. Besides, if I’d let you arrest Éric, he would have spilled the whole story. I was trapped … And then there was my mother … He’s the only one she still recognises. The only person who still connects her to her past, who could give her back her sense of self – sometimes. I couldn’t have taken that away from her, you have to understand …”
Vilar shook his head. He took a step back, drew this pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Pradeau’s head.
“I don’t understand anything. This is what I should do. And put a bullet in my own head after.”
Tears streamed down his face. His voice trailed off in a dry cough.
Pradeau had not moved. He went on in the same monotone. “When they feel trapped, they’re prepared to do anything to save their arses. They murdered two girls who tried to blackmail a magistrate. They’d recognised him because he’d banged up one of their friends for a drugs offence.”
“How do you know that? Was it your brother? Is he the one who … ?”
Pradeau shrugged.
“He made the bodies disappear. He tossed them in the ocean off Hendaye. One of them washed up on Hossegor beach a month later. After that, I got myself out of that shit. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Of course not, because deep down you’re a good man. When it comes down to it, you’re just too nice, is that what you’re saying? I’m betting it was you who drove the boat, yeah? What were you doing, talking to seagulls?”
“Don’t be so fucking stupid. When the girls went missing a month apart I realised what had happened. That was when I got out. That’s when Éric and I lost touch. I even stopped going to visit my parents so I wouldn’t run into him.”
Vilar glanced towards the car where Sanz lay asleep. He put the gun back in his pocket.
“I don’t give a shit about your family problems. Take me to this place and keep your trap shut. I don’t think there’s anything else you can say in your defence.”
Pradeau turned away and sighed. He climbed behind the steering wheel of his car and drove off.
Vilar followed him through the centre of Castillon and turned onto a road that had once been an old towpath along the Dordogne. Below them was the river, but they could not see it because it was so utterly black. After a couple of kilometres, Pradeau turned the car onto a dirt track and stopped almost immediately, switching off his headlights. Vilar did likewise and night once again closed over him. He got out of the car, allowed a breath of wind to wash over his face and forced himself to take deep breaths because once again the weight of the darkness was suffocating him. He tried to make something out in the murk, but not a glimmer, not a shadow could be seen. He was aware of the trees only from the rustle of the breeze through the leaves, of the river only from the sound of lapping against the bank.
“Pablo,” he whispered, but this time the name found no echo, was engulfed by shadows, where before the air about him seemed to tremble at the mere mention of the name.
He heard Pradeau click the breech of a gun and slide it into a holster. He saw him shine a torch against his hand to check it was working.
“It’s at the end of this path, about a hundred metres. Lafon and his wife will be there, and a younger guy. I’ve been keeping tabs on them for four days. I haven’t spotted anyone else.”
Vilar opened the boot of his car, took out the rifle, felt the weight of the cartridge pouch, then decided to leave them.
Pradeau walked on ahead. As he passed Pradeau’s car, Vilar said, “What about him?”
“Are you going to miss him? I think he’s asleep. I’ll sort him out after. Come on, we don’t need any light to follow the path, it’s flat and it’s not far. It’s a big place, almost a mansion. We’ll see the lights.”
“No dog?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
They walked on in silence. All that could be heard was their breathing and the crack of footsteps on pebbles. Above the trees to the left a blue halo indicated the lights of Castillon. The house appeared, tall and pale, dimly lit by two small lanterns flanking a flight of steps. Two of the ground-floor windows were clearly lit up. A little further off, on the edge of the circle of light, four cars were parked.
Pradeau stopped dead. Vilar, walking behind, almost bumped into him.
“What is it?”
“Gravel. They’ll hear us.”
Vilar carried on regardless. The sound of his footsteps echoed off the facade, a sort of muffled crackle that could probably be heard from the road. Inside the house a dog barked. Short high-pitched yelps. Vilar could already picture the breed of dog, the kind he could kill with a single kick. He climbed the flight of steps. Pradeau followed him. The dog went on yapping. Vilar drew his pistol and gently pushed the door, which was not bolted. He was no longer thinking about anything. He was aware only that the cruel sands of these minutes as they trickled through the hourglass with inexorable slowness weighed more than his whole life. He knew that he would live with this weight forever or be buried by it. His feet knew, as they walked on unstoppably in the darkness; his lungs knew, as they breathed evenly and deeply; his calm heart and his whole body knew, responding now with not a trace of tiredness or tension. He crossed a large hall and found himself at the foot of a staircase, turned and saw the shadowy figure of Pradeau join him. The dog suddenly fell silent.
On the right, they heard the muffled sound of a television. A burst of voices from some American movie.
Vilar headed in this direction, the pistol pressed against his thigh. When he opened the door, he saw only the vast television screen, shadows dancing around it. He stepped into the room and noticed a form lying across a low table but did not at first recognise what it was, so he moved closer and now saw that it was the body of a naked man whose head had been hacked off – or rather beaten to a pulp, since the arcing sprays of blood and brain matter were streaked across the wall opposite, and the piece of modern art that hung there. Vilar crouched down and felt his stomach heave when he realised that the lower jaw, with its row of terrifyingly white teeth, was still attached to the base of the skull. He stood up, gasping as he tried to suck in as much air as he could, choking back the nausea that welled in his throat, shaking off the disorientating paralysis he could feel creeping through him. Pradeau, who had just stepped into the room, let out a cry of revulsion which was drowned out by the chatter of the television, but Vilar ignored him and turned to the wall looking for what he was certain he would find: the blast of buckshot that had embedded itself in the partition wall and ripped the canvas in two places. The wall was riddled with shot. Here and there the plaster had come away and there were small, irregular craters dotted amid the splattered human remains. V
ilar guessed that two shots had been fired simultaneously, hence the damage to the body. It was already beginning to smell. Death must have taken placed about two days earlier.
He avoided looking at the corpse and turned to Pradeau, who had switched on two lamps on top of an antique chest. He had pulled on his latex gloves as though about to examine the crime scene.
“Can you explain this?”
“I’ve no fucking idea. It’s not like I was sat outside all day and all night.”
“Who is this guy?”
Pradeau moved forward a little, stepping around the sofa and glancing coldly at the body as he turned off the television.
“The young guy who lives with them.”
“He was fucking both of them?”
Pradeau gave a crooked smile and shrugged.
“They didn’t exactly invite me in to watch. But it would be their style.”
“We have to find the other two.”
Vilar went out into the hall, hesitating as to which door to open first. The wave of nausea had passed, but he could feel a migraine pounding dully against his temples. He felt as though he were in some parallel dimension. With every step he fell deeper into the nightmare, and he knew it would only end when he slipped, exhausted, into unconsciousness. In the kitchen he found dishes in the sink and the remains of a meal on the table. An electric coffee maker was plugged in and gave off a revolting smell of burnt coffee. He discovered a living room decked out in black leather and stainless steel and hung with garish paintings, a dining room lit by a crystal chandelier, filled with antique furniture. Pradeau followed behind him. Sometimes he could feel his breath on the back of his neck.
The dog began to bark again, a long, continuous howl. It was coming from the floor above. Vilar ran up the stairs, shouldered open the doors.
The smell of excrement and putrefaction hit him just as he was dazzled by a blaze of white light. Lit by three small, round spotlights, the bodies of a man and a woman lay entwined on the vast bed. The man was lying between the woman’s thighs. Vilar could see his flabby back, his sagging arse around which one of the woman’s legs had been crooked. The warm air and the pervading stench was unbreathable.
The dog had rushed ahead into the room, and his high-pitched yaps were now deafening. It was one of those small, shaggy dogs, beloved of elderly women, that look like mops, with hair hanging down from their bellies in dubious tassels. The dog managed to dodge two kicks, but the third lifted him off the ground, winding him and sending him flying to the far end of the room where he crouched by the wall, ears flattened.
There was blood everywhere. On the sheets, the carpets, the walls, the upturned bedside table.
Vilar stepped closer to the bodies and saw the gaping chest of the woman, her left breast and shoulder reduced to pulp by the force of the shot. The man no longer had a face and for a second Vilar could not understand how the whole front of his head – forehead, eyes, nose, jaws – could have been shot away. He assumed he must have been shot in the temple at point-blank range. Some of the contents of his skull had dripped onto the woman’s face creating a glutinous, brownish mask. Vilar jerked back, suddenly bent double by a wave of nausea. Spasms wracked his stomach, he vomited bile, coughed, swallowed great mouthfuls of the warm fetid air.
Just then he noticed the video camera mounted on a tripod and behind it on a small table, a computer with a webcam. As he lifted his head, the migraine now pounding full force, he saw Pradeau standing in the doorway holding a pump-action shotgun.
“What’s the hell’s going on?” Vilar said. “What the fuck is this place?”
“The house belongs to a guy who knew too much. A bit like you. I’m just cleaning house, is all. What did you expect? You really think I give a fuck at this stage?”
Pradeau pumped the shotgun and Vilar threw himself to the floor just as the back of an armchair behind him exploded and toppled to the ground. He pulled his hand from under him, still gripping the pistol, and managed to blindly fire off two rounds and saw Pradeau leap back and disappear. The air was filled with plaster dust. An acrid cloud of smoke from the gunshots floated above the corpses. He stepped out of the room and immediately ducked, hearing the boom of the shotgun and seeing the flare coming from the stairwell just as the wall behind him splintered into shards of brick and plaster. Bent double, he scuttled over to the banister and lay on his belly, stunned, vaguely trying to convince himself that all this would stop, that reality would resume, that time would start up again from the moment he pushed open the front door and stepped onto the gravel. He stared into the darkness of the ground floor, all the more impenetrable after the glare of the bedroom, and could see nothing. He tried to calm his breathing the better to hear, but he could not make out even a faint rustle. Then he heard a clattering from the bedroom and, turning, saw the little dog appear. Seeing Vilar, it stopped in the doorway, then trotted towards him, wagging its head as though happy to have finally found someone. The animal moved closer, pressing its snout against his face, and viciously he shoved it away.
He noticed that the stench of death clung to the dog’s shaggy coat. It came back, sitting about two metres from him like some baleful creature, a harbinger of calamity and pestilence. He waved at it to go away. Eventually, the animal trotted off on its thin paws and disappeared down the stairs. Vilar heard the faint scratching of its claws on the stairs and then a door creaking.
He got to his feet and walked to the stairs, moving slowly down them with his back pressed against the wall. As he reached ground level, he looked up at the luminous rectangle from which a livid light spilled only to be quickly swallowed by the darkness. He got his bearings and crept past the doors he had pushed opened earlier. There was nothing he could do when a hand grabbed his shoulder and dragged him into a pitch-dark room.
He stumbled down three steps, twisting his ankle, and found himself on all fours on the rough tiles, his pistol skittering across the floor. A bare bulb flickered on. Pradeau had the shotgun trained on him.
“It has to look convincing, don’t you think?”
The room was some sort of scullery with whitewashed walls and a low, dark-panelled ceiling, with gaps between some of the beams. In one corner was a stone sink and a laundry basin. Under three small, rounded windows stood a workbench with a vice and a clutter of tools, and above it was a board on which hung some other tools and also coils of wire, electrical cables and string. Upended chairs stood on top of a wooden table. Pradeau stepped towards him. He was smiling, the shotgun resting against his shoulder.
“No point firing all over the place. Shit, we’re not cowboys. And besides, it’s really important that your death is a suicide … Important to me, I mean … Here you are, the desperate detective searching for his son, you’ve just killed that sad paedophile fuck. And here I am wiping out two witnesses who were becoming a real pain in the arse. That fucker upstairs was prepared to spill all my dirty little secrets just for the sake of bringing down a cop. Clever set-up, don’t you think? I should have been a movie director. Besides, you make the perfect audience, you’ll believe any shit, you dumb fuck.”
His voice was slurred and he blinked against the bright light. His upper body was swaying back and forth almost imperceptibly.
Vilar tried to make sense of what was happening. Pradeau’s words hung in the air between them and then finally the penny dropped.
“Pablo …” he said.
He was overcome by a wave of grief and rage. He would die without discovering anything, without knowing anything, without understanding anything. Here his son’s name was meaningless; it was sucked into this sordid quagmire.
From the hall came the sound of a door slamming, glass shattering. They heard Sanz calling to his brother. The voice was frenzied, breathless. Pradeau seemed to hesitate. He did not take his eyes off Vilar, but it was clear that he was listening. Sanz’s shuffling footsteps were coming towards them. They could hear him panting and moaning. He babbled incoherently, cursing his brother, shoutin
g threats.
Pradeau came and stood behind Vilar, pumped the shotgun and raised it to his shoulder just as his brother appeared in the doorway. Vilar hurled himself backwards, anticipating that Pradeau was not in a firing position. He slammed into him, sending both of them sprawling onto their backs while Sanz hobbled towards them, a knife in his hand. Pradeau’s head hit the tiles with a dull thud and Vilar had time to wriggle free and roll onto his side. He grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and was surprised to be able to take it from him with no resistance. One arm over his eyes, one knee raised, Pradeau struggled feebly.
Vilar managed to prop himself on one knee, but Sanz launched himself towards him, brandishing the knife. Vilar squeezed the trigger and saw Sanz’s body spin, huge and black beneath the dazzling glare of the bulb. He reeled across the room, and then collapsed.
Vilar got to his feet and it took a few seconds for the white-hot intensity of the migraine burning his eyes and his brain to subside. He looked down at Sanz, sprawled on his belly, one shoulder almost completely blown away, leaving only shreds of skin and fabric. He lay in a pool of blood that streaked the floor. Pradeau seemed to be asleep, one arm shielding his eyes. Vilar nudged him in the ribs with his foot. Pradeau only groaned. Vilar saw the pistol under the table and went to get it. He unloaded the cartridges from the shotgun, dry fired the weapon and tossed it in the corner.
Pradeau allowed himself to be tied up, offering no resistance. As Vilar yanked his arms behind his back he could see the man was crying. He tried to think of something to say but found nothing, nothing that might make him suffer more than the present catastrophe. He bound his elbows with wire and his ankles with rope, then lashed the two together so that he could not move. He did the same with Sanz, who howled every time he was forced to move. It was not particularly his intention to hurt him, yet each moan brought a sense of satisfaction. He realised, in spite of the heat and his terrible thirst, his mouth was watering.
Talking to Ghosts Page 39
