Don't Turn Out the Lights

by Bernard Minier

  ‘You think that someone might have written a fake letter and then put it in your mailbox? Why would they do that, in your opinion? Isn’t that a rather … strange idea?’

  She frowned slightly. She had just noticed something in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘Yes … maybe. I – I don’t know. I’ve tried to imagine every possible explanation.’

  ‘In that case, wouldn’t it be far more logical to imagine that the letter was written by someone who wants to attract attention?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But the two explanations don’t rule each other out.’

  ‘Someone who is seeking, unconsciously or not, to make others talk about him – or her – to draw attention to their situation, their distress…’

  Christine grew even more puzzled. The cop was not talking off the top of his head, she now realised. He was drawing ever smaller concentric circles around the true aim of the conversation – the one he himself had determined right from the start.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, leaning forward, looking at her from under his brows, ‘but there are no fingerprints on the letter or the envelope other than your own. What sort of printer do you have?’

  ‘What?! What do you mean? You’re not implying that—’

  ‘Is it your fiancé who wants to delay the date of your marriage, Miss Steinmeyer? Has he said that he would like to take a break? That he is having second thoughts? Has he ever mentioned … splitting up?’

  She couldn’t believe her ears.

  ‘Absolutely not!’

  He raised his voice. ‘Have you ever been treated for psychiatric problems? Don’t lie. You know it’s very easy for me to find out.’

  She felt as if the ground beneath her feet were slipping away. Right from the start this was where he had been headed. This moron thought she was the author. He thought she was making things up, that she was out of her mind!

  ‘Are you insinuating that I wrote that letter myself before I brought it to you?’ she asked, incredulous.

  ‘Because isn’t that what you did? Do you have something to say on the subject?’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ she answered, pushing her chair back and getting to her feet.

  ‘What? What did you say?’ She saw him sit up straight and turn red in the face. ‘I could have you prosecuted for insulting behaviour—’

  ‘See me to the door,’ she interrupted. ‘We have nothing more to say to each other.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  8

  Melodrama

  Servaz went through the emblazoned doors of the Grand Hôtel Thomas Wilson at one o’clock. He crossed the lobby towards the reception, from one carpet to the next, surrounded by leather, woodwork, more woodwork, more leather, and placed the electronic key on the counter. He took out his warrant card.

  ‘This is one of your electronic keys.’

  It wasn’t really a question. The young receptionist looked at both the key and the speaker. He took note of the open collar of her white blouse and the lace on her bra. Then she checked the computer.

  ‘Yes. But the key must have been deactivated, as I see that someone was staying in room 117 this morning. Where did you find it?’

  ‘Do they often disappear?’

  She made a face.

  ‘It happens. They get lost, stolen. Or the guest forgets to turn in the key before taking his plane back to China.’

  ‘Is room 117 booked today?’

  She looked again at her screen.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Under what name?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I can—’

  ‘It’s Servaz, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. She was quite pretty, as it happened.

  ‘When was the reservation made?’

  ‘Three days ago. On the hotel website.’

  He looked at her the way a junkie looks at a dealer.

  ‘Do you have an email address? A credit card number?’

  ‘Both. And a telephone number as well.’

  ‘Can you print that out for me? Now, right away?’

  ‘Um … Perhaps I should speak to the manager, first.’

  He watched as she picked up the telephone, and they waited. The hotel manager appeared two minutes later. He was tall, with round glasses. He shook the policeman’s hand ceremoniously.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  Servaz considered the situation. He was on sick leave. He did not have the right to be there asking questions, let alone a warrant.

  ‘An investigation for the Criminal Affairs Division,’ he lied. ‘Identity theft. Someone booked a room in this hotel in the name of another person without informing them. And they have committed several criminal acts in his name and with his credit card. I asked your employee to print out a copy of the reservation.’

  ‘Hmm. I see. No problem. We’ll get that for you.’

  He turned to the employee. ‘Marjorie…’

  Marjorie sent the document to the little printer beneath the counter, bent down to take the sheet of paper and handed it to them. The manager glanced at it briefly before giving it to Servaz. Not without a faint frown, which Servaz duly noted.

  ‘Um … there you are.’

  ‘Thank you. This room 117,’ said Servaz suddenly, ‘is there anything special about it?’

  The young receptionist and the manager looked at each other. Their silent exchange set off his inner alarm.

  ‘Well, that is,’ said the manager after clearing his voice, ‘there was, um, indeed something that happened a year ago.’

  He wiped his hand over his face, then over his curly hair.

  ‘A woman committed suicide.’

  His voice went strangely shrill and there was a tremor in it, as if he had a cold. Followed by a murmur not unlike a rustling of leaves.

  ‘It was horrible. Terrible. She … she … Well, let’s just say that first she, um, broke all the mirrors in the bathroom … and in the room … And then, and then, she slit her wrists and she, um, tried in vain to, to…’ His voice was now so faint that Servaz had to lean closer. ‘She tried to cut open her stomach with a piece of mirror then, because she couldn’t do it fast enough, she slit her own throat.’

  He looked around to make sure the businessmen sitting in the armchairs a bit further away had not heard the story. Servaz felt as if two large veins were throbbing in his temples. He saw his dream again: Marianne, naked and disembowelled in that hut. It made his head spin. Fear was pounding under the skin of his brow: the icy, familiar voice of terror.

  ‘May I see the room?’

  It seemed to him that his own voice was no longer so firm and confident. The manager nodded. Servaz held out his hand and the receptionist placed a plastic card in it, identical to the one Servaz had received.

  ‘Come with me.’

  In the lift, their reflections in the mirror watched them, like frightening clones. Servaz could see the moisture at the roots of the manager’s auburn hair in the overhead light. The only sound was the manager’s uneasy breathing. The doors opened onto a carpeted corridor.

  ‘This is a platinum room,’ said the manager, walking down the silent corridor. ‘Thirty-two square metres, king-size bed, an LCD screen, fifty channels, minibar, safe, coffee machine, bathrobe, slippers, free broadband and WiFi, and a bath big enough for two.’

  Servaz thought to himself that the man was reciting the inventory in order to cling to something reassuring and familiar. He must not come to room 117 very often. He must leave it to the cleaning women and the hotel porters. Was he the one who had found the body?

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  ‘It’s not the sort of thing you forget, unfortunately. Célia Jablonka. An artist.’

  Servaz had already heard the name. Or read it. He seemed to remember articles in the newspapers, a year ago. Suicides were not the responsibility of the crime division, but of Public Safety. However, the manner in which the young woman had killed herself, and her profession, meant that peo
ple had talked about her at the time.

  The manager stood still.

  There was a click inside the door of room 117 when he ran the key card over the gilded lock. In the room there was the same smell of floral perfume, cleaning products and fresh linen as in every luxury hotel. A little hallway with a luggage rack and two white bathrobes on hangers. The door to the bathroom was slightly open. And here’s the bedroom … The silver-coloured headboard was made of large padded diamond shapes, and reached all the way to the ceiling; bright red pillows, a grey laminated floor, ebony walls and little chrome lamps, whose light traced a pattern against the gloom.

  Very kitsch.

  It was like being inside a box of chocolates with a double layer of pralines separated by silver paper.

  Silence. Except for the manager’s laboured breathing behind his back. The double glazing muffled the noise from the circular piazza below, and the walls were thick – in proportion, no doubt, with the price of the rooms. Servaz peered out through the blinds, between the thick curtains, at the white swirl of snowflakes.

  ‘Show me. Which mirrors she broke. Where she was found. How she went about it. What she did.’

  The manager was wheezing. ‘Yes.’

  He walked over to the door, pressed a switch and the bathroom lit up. Servaz slipped inside. A bubble of light. A double washbasin with waterfall taps, a basket full of shampoo and little soaps, clean towels carefully folded, a large mirror: in the blaze of light the two men looked dazed, stupid.

  ‘This mirror,’ said the manager. ‘There were pieces of glass everywhere, and blood. It was … awful. The basins, the floor, the walls: everything was splattered with blood. It was unbearable to see. But that’s not where we found her.’

  He went back out into the room.

  ‘We found her lying on the bed, her arms outstretched.’

  The manager sounded like a diver preparing to dive, holding his breath.

  ‘Naked,’ he added.

  Servaz didn’t say anything. A wind from Poland was sweeping through his brain. The howling of wolves. Blood on the snow. A hut in the night. He gulped. Felt his knees shaking. He wasn’t ready. It was too soon.

  ‘Who found her? Was it you?’

  The manager could tell from his voice that he was upset. He shot him a look of surprise. Surprise, no doubt, at the fact that a cop from the Criminal Division could be this emotional. For a brief moment their eyes met; a horn sounded outside.

  ‘No. It was the hotel porter. The door to the room was open and music was blaring. We could hear it all the way down the corridor. He thought it was strange, so he pushed open the door and called out. No answer. And that music, blasting, it was, it was opera…’

  He said the word as if it were something insane.

  ‘Opera?’

  ‘Yes. We found the CD case on the bed next to her. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. The opera where Senta, a young woman, jumps off the top of a cliff. Committing suicide,’ he added, in case the cop hadn’t understood. (In his opinion, all cops must be thick, like in films.)

  Another thought occurred to Servaz. Music, here. Music in that psychiatric institute, up in the mountains, four years ago. He could feel a vice tightening around his heart.

  ‘The poor boy, he went closer. First he saw her feet.’

  The manager’s speech was more and more halting. As if his words were keeping pace with the hotel porter’s steps.

  ‘Then her legs, her lower body … It was the wound to her stomach that caught his attention. She’d really gone at it, cut it several times over: it was a mess, but she hadn’t managed to damage any vital organs. Then as he got closer, he saw her slit wrists and, finally, her throat … a shard of glass had stayed in her neck … the blood had splattered everywhere, on the bed, the walls, the floor. The headboard had to be changed; it was irreparable. According to the doctors, she initially tried to perform hara-kiri by ramming a glass triangle into her abdomen, and when she didn’t succeed she finally cut her throat.’

  Servaz stared at the empty bed. Trying to reconstruct the scene, what the hotel porter had found. The ugly wounds to her stomach, her wrists, her throat. The jagged piece of mirror planted in her flesh. The opera pounding in her eardrums. Her dead gaze, her open mouth.

  ‘Does the porter still work for you?’

  ‘No, he resigned. In fact, he didn’t come back the next day. We never saw him again. But of course we weren’t about to sack him … given the circumstances. He emailed his resignation a few weeks later.’

  ‘What about you, did you see her?’

  A hesitation.

  ‘Yes … yes; I saw her. The porter came to get me.’

  He obviously didn’t want to say anything more. Servaz could understand why. And in any case, he could get the details elsewhere.

  ‘I don’t see any CD or MP3 player,’ he said.

  ‘She had brought it with her. There are music channels and radio stations on the television, but there’s no player.’

  ‘So you’re saying that she came with her own? Just so that music would be playing when she took her life?’

  ‘I suppose she wanted to die to it,’ said the manager, in the sort of tone a cop might have used. ‘And she knew she wouldn’t find that sort of thing in a hotel. Who knows what was going through her head at the time.’

  ‘In that case, why not commit suicide at home?’

  The manager looked at him as if to say, You’re the police, not me.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Do you remember how long she’d been here?’

  ‘She’d arrived that day.’

  A deliberate decision. There must be something significant about the hotel. According to Célia Jablonka’s staging of the event, it was important. As was the opera. Did the people from Public Safety pick up on these details? Or had they merely wound up the case in no time at all? And who had been in charge of the autopsy? Servaz hoped it was Delmas: he might be irascible but he was very professional. The way I used to be, too, before …

  Finally, the two most important questions: who had sent him this key one year later? And why?

  9

  Intermission

  The leaf came loose from the branch, fluttered for a moment in front of him, inscribing invisible arabesques, and finally fell just by the tip of his shoes in the dirty snow on the pavement. How had it managed to cling on until then on the bare tree, when all the other leaves had fallen long before? His cigarette trembled in similar fashion between his lips, and he had a sudden overwhelming vision of his own fragility, his own struggle. His soul, would it see in the spring?

  He took the cigarette from his lips, hardly smoked, and with a shrug of his shoulders crushed it with his heel next to the shrivelled leaf. A little ritual on the part of the repentant smoker. Eight months. Before crossing the cobblestones to seek refuge in the warmth of the entrance hall, he took out his mobile and rang Delmas.

  ‘An artist named Célia Jablonka who committed suicide last year in a room at the Grand Hôtel Thomas Wilson: does that ring a bell?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Does that mean yes or no?’

  ‘Yes. I’m the one who performed the autopsy.’

  Servaz smiled.

  ‘Suicide or not suicide?’

  ‘Suicide.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Am I in the habit of talking through my hat?’ said the pathologist, defensively.

  Servaz’s smile widened.

  ‘No,’ he conceded.

  ‘There could not be the slightest doubt.’

  ‘And yet,’ he insisted, ‘you have to admit that that business with the opera and the way she cut her throat with a piece of mirror…’

  ‘Listen. Incredible as it might seem, that girl did it herself. And no one helped her. Full stop. You have no idea what people can inflict upon themselves. The kind of wound, the absence of any marks on her wrists: if someone had wanted to force her to cut her throat, she would have struggled, believe me; the toxico
logical tests, the projections and splashes, the wounds before death to the right hand … I can’t remember the details but everything matched up, there were no grey areas. It was all clear and precise.’

  ‘What was found in the toxicological analysis, do you remember?’

  ‘Yup. She had taken a sleeping tablet roughly fifteen hours earlier, and there were also enough antidepressants and tranquillisers in her blood to knock out an elephant. But no drugs: that I remember because, given the ferocity of her attack on herself, I initially thought she must have taken something hallucinogenic, then I suspected decompensation because of the benzodiazepines. No doubt with prior thoughts of suicide. Are you back at work?’

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘That means no, I suppose. With all due respect, allow me to point out that one, the case was closed ages ago and two, you are on sick leave and as such, I am not supposed to be sharing details like this with you. Why the sudden interest in that poor girl? Did you know her?’

  ‘Not until an hour ago.’

  ‘Right, I see. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me. But when the time comes, I really would like to know why you’ve taken this sudden interest in her. And exactly what the hell you’re up to, Martin.’

  ‘Later. Thanks.’

  ‘Take care of yourself. Do you really think you’re ready?’

  Ready? Ready for what? he wondered. All he was doing was gathering information.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this conversation never took place.’

  Silence.

  ‘What conversation?’

  He hung up. So the girl had committed suicide. There was no slipping past Delmas. In that case, why had the key been sent to him, a cop in the Criminal Division? Suicides were not his remit. And why did they choose him, when he was on leave, put out to pasture, supposedly treating his mal-être in a rest home, as useless as a boxer who hasn’t trained in months? He took the rectangular key from his pocket and stared at it: the logo and the letters ‘T’ and ‘W’, and the paper with its message in blue ink:

  Meeting tomorrow in room 117.

  10

  Soprano

  Christine watched as the young man busied himself with her door, his toolbox open next to him. He had already replaced the old cylinder lock with a three-point one, and installed a safety chain, and now he was drilling through the door to install a spyhole. He had explained that the ideal thing would be to replace the old door with a steel bulletproof one, with joints integrated into the doorframe and soldered hinge guards, but despite everything, she had no intention of turning her flat into an impregnable fortress.