The Circle

by Bernard Minier

  That was what he had loved, back then, that pride. Until it became a wall between them.

  ‘Hello, Marianne,’ he said.

  She hurried over to him. A moment later she was embracing him. He felt a sort of seismic shock go through him, along with the sobs that were shaking her. He put his arms around her, without holding her tighter. A gesture that spoke more of protocol than intimacy. How many years had it been? Nineteen? Twenty? She had cast him out of her life, had gone off with someone else, and found a way to leave him with the blame. He had loved her, yes. Perhaps more than any other woman before or since. But it had all happened in another century, so long ago …

  She took a step back and looked at him, and her long hair, now drenched, caressed his cheek as she did so. Once again he felt a slight tremor go through him, magnitude 4 on the Servaz scale. Her eyes, so close, like two green and shining pools. He read a multitude of contradictory emotions in them, including pain, sorrow, doubt and fear. But also gratitude and hope. A tiny, timid hope. That she placed in him. He looked elsewhere to calm the pounding of his heart. Nineteen years and she had hardly changed at all, beyond the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and her mouth.

  He brought to mind her words on the telephone: ‘Something terrible has happened.’ At the time, he thought she was talking about herself, something she had done, until he realised it was about her son: ‘Hugo … he found a woman in her house, dead. Everything makes him look guilty, Martin … They’ll say he did it…’ As she spoke her voice was so broken by sobs, her throat so tight, that he hadn’t understood half of what she was saying.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He just called me. He was drugged … He woke up in this woman’s house and she was … dead …’

  It was absurd, what she was telling him, it made no sense. He wondered if she had been drinking, or had taken something.

  ‘Marianne, I don’t understand. What are you talking about? Who is this woman?’

  ‘A teacher. In Marsac. One of his teachers.’

  Marsac … That’s where Margot was studying. Even on the telephone he had found it difficult to hide his distress. Then he said to himself that between the university, the lycée and the secondary school, there must be at least a hundred teachers in Marsac. What were the odds that Margot had been one of her students?

  ‘They’re going to accuse him, Martin … He’s innocent. Hugo could never do such a thing. I beg you, you have to help us …’

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said now. ‘I—’

  ‘Not now … go on home. I’ll be in touch.’

  She gave him a desperate look. Without waiting for her answer, he turned on his heels and headed towards the house.

  ‘Captain Bécker?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He flashed his card for the second time, even though it was difficult to see anything inside the house.

  ‘Commandant Servaz, Toulouse crime squad. This is Lieutenant Espérandieu.’

  ‘Who called you?’ asked Bécker right away.

  A stocky man in his early fifties, he looked like the sort who slept badly, judging from the bags under his eyes. He also looked as if he had been very shaken up by what he had seen. And he was in a foul temper. Yet another man who’d been dragged away from his football.

  ‘A witness,’ said Servaz evasively. ‘Who called you?’

  Bécker sniffed, reluctant to share his information with strangers.

  ‘A neighbour. Oliver Winshaw. An Englishman who lives there, across the street.’

  He pointed over the wall.

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘The window of his study overlooks the garden. He saw a young man sitting beside the pool and a load of dolls floating in the water. He thought it was peculiar, so he called us.’

  ‘Dolls?’

  ‘Yes. You can see for yourself.’

  They were standing in the living room: the house was in complete darkness, like all the houses in Marsac. The door to the street was open and the only light in the room came from the headlights of the vehicles parked outside, stretching the men’s shadows across the walls. In the obscurity Servaz could make out an open-plan kitchen, a round glass table sparkling with reflected light, four wrought-iron chairs, a dresser and, behind a column, a stairway leading to the floor above. The humid air wafted in through the French windows, and Servaz noted that someone had blocked them so they wouldn’t bang.

  A gendarme walked past them; the beam from his torch lit up their silhouettes for a moment.

  ‘We’re in the process of setting up a generator,’ said Bécker.

  ‘Where’s the kid?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘In the van. In safe custody. We’re going to take him back to the gendarmerie.’

  ‘And the victim?’

  The gendarme pointed to the ceiling.

  ‘Up there. In the attic. In the bathroom.’

  From his voice, Servaz could tell he was still in shock.

  ‘Did she live alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Judging from what he had seen from the street, it was a big house: four floors, if you included the attic and the ground floor – even though each level was no more than fifty square metres.

  ‘She was a teacher, right?’

  ‘Claire Diemar. Thirty-two years old. She taught I don’t know what in Marsac.’

  Servaz’s gaze met the captain’s in the darkness.

  ‘The kid was one of her students,’ said Bécker.

  ‘What?’

  The thunder had drowned out the gendarme’s words.

  ‘I said, the kid was in one of her classes.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Servaz stared at Bécker in the dark, both of them lost in thought.

  ‘I suppose you’re more used to this sort of thing than I am,’ said the gendarme at last. ‘But let me warn you: it is not a pretty sight. I’ve never seen anything so … revolting.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. They turned towards it. ‘May I know who you are?’

  Someone was coming down the stairs.

  ‘Commandant Servaz, Toulouse crime squad.’

  The man held out a leather-gloved hand. He must have been almost seven feet tall. At the top of his body Servaz could just make out a long neck, a strange square head with protruding ears and hair cut very short. The giant crushed his still-damp hand in the soft leather.

  ‘Roland Castaing, public prosecutor for Auch. I’ve just had Catherine on the telephone. She told me you were on your way. May I ask who filled you in?’

  He was referring to Cathy d’Humières, chief prosecutor for the Toulouse region, whom Servaz had worked with several times before, in particular on the case that had taken him to the Wargnier Institute a year and a half earlier. Now Servaz hesitated.

  ‘Marianne Bokhanowsky, the young man’s mother,’ he replied.

  A silence fell.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  The prosecutor’s tone was slightly astonished and suspicious. He had a deep, solemn voice that rolled over his consonants like the wheels of a cart over pebbles.

  ‘Yes. A bit. But I hadn’t seen her for years.’

  ‘So why, in that case, did she call you?’ asked Castaing.

  Once again Servaz hesitated.

  ‘Undoubtedly because my name has been in the news.’

  For a moment the man remained silent. Servaz could tell that he was examining him, looking down on him from his great height. Even in the dark he could tell the prosecutor’s gaze was on him, and he shivered: the newcomer made him think of a statue from Easter Island.

  ‘Ah yes, of course … The killings at Saint-Martin-de-Comminges. Of course, that was you … an incredible business. I imagine it must leave a mark, a case like that, Commandant?’

  There was something about the magistrate’s tone that Servaz found extremely unpleasant.

  ‘That still doesn’t explain what you are doing here.’

  ‘I told you: Hugo’s mother asked
me to come and take a look.’

  ‘The case has not yet been assigned to you,’ said the magistrate sharply.

  ‘No, it hasn’t.’

  ‘It falls within the jurisdiction of the public prosecutor’s office at Auch. Not Toulouse.’

  Servaz almost replied that the office in Auch had only a very small investigation squad, and that not a single major criminal investigation had been assigned to it in recent years, but he refrained.

  ‘You’ve come a long way to get here, Commandant,’ said Castaing. ‘And I suppose, like all of us, you had to sacrifice the evening’s television. So go on up and have a look, but I warn you: it’s not a pretty sight. Although it’s true that, unlike most of us, you’ve seen worse.’

  Servaz merely nodded. Suddenly he knew that he had to be on this case, no matter what.

  The dolls were looking at the night sky. Servaz thought to himself that a corpse floating in the swimming pool would have more or less the same expression. They were rocking, their pale dresses undulating to the same rhythm, and sometimes they bumped together lightly. He was standing at the edge of the pool with Espérandieu. His assistant had opened an umbrella the size of a parasol over their heads. The rain was ricocheting off it, and off the flagstones and the toes of their shoes.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Espérandieu, simply.

  This was his favourite way of summing up a situation that, in his opinion, was incomprehensible.

  ‘She collected them,’ he said. ‘I don’t think whoever killed her brought them with him. He must have found them in the house.’

  Servaz nodded. He counted. Nineteen … Another flash of lightning lit up their streaming faces. The most striking thing was all those staring expressions. He knew that a similar expression would be waiting for them upstairs, and he prepared himself mentally.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Once they were indoors, they put on gloves, caps over their hair, and nylon overshoes. Darkness enveloped them; the generator wasn’t working yet, apparently there was a technical problem. They prepared themselves in silence; neither Vincent nor Servaz felt like talking. Servaz took out his torch and switched it on. Espérandieu did the same. They began to climb the stairs.

  4

  Illumination

  The lightning flashing through the skylights illuminated the steps as they creaked beneath their feet. The glow from the torches sculpted their faces from below, and Espérandieu could see his boss’s eyes shining like two black pebbles while he looked, head lowered, for traces of footprints on the stairway. As he climbed he placed his feet as close as possible to the skirting board on either side, spreading his legs like an All Blacks rugby player during the haka.

  ‘Let’s just hope that our friend the prosecutor went up and down the same way,’ he said.

  Someone had left a storm lamp on the top landing. It cast an uncertain brilliance on the door.

  Servaz paused on the threshold. He looked at his watch. 23.10. A particularly bright flash of lightning lit up the bathroom window as they went in. An ear-splitting clap of thunder immediately followed. They took another step and swept their torch beams over the space under the roof. They had to hurry. The crime scene officers would be here soon, but for the moment they were on their own. The attic room was completely dark, with the exception of the fireworks beyond the window … and the bath, which formed a sort of light blue rectangle in the darkness at the far end of the room.

  Like a swimming pool … lit up from inside …

  Servaz could feel his pulse pounding in his throat. He moved the beam of his torch over the floor. Then he forced himself to go closer to the bath, hugging the walls. It wasn’t easy: there were bottles and candles everywhere, small pieces of furniture and a basin, a towel rack, a mirror. A double curtain framed the bath. It had been pulled open and Servaz could now see water gleaming against the porcelain. And a shadow.

  There was something in the bath … Something, or rather, someone.

  The bath was an old-fashioned clawfoot model in white cast iron. It was nearly two metres long, and it was deep – so deep that Servaz had to walk the last metre from where he stood to be able to see into the bottom.

  He took another step. Wanted to recoil, repressed the urge.

  She was in there, looking at him with her blue eyes wide open, as if she were waiting for him. She also had her mouth open, which made it seem as if she were about to say something. But of course that was impossible, because her expression was dead. There was nothing living left in it.

  Bécker and Castaing had been right: even Servaz had rarely seen anything so horrifying. Except perhaps the decapitated horse on the mountainside … But unlike them, he knew how to control his emotions. Claire Diemar had been tied with an absolutely unbelievable length of rope, wound many times over around her torso, her legs, her ankles, her neck and her arms, passing under her armpits, between her thighs, and crushing her chest, the rough rope biting deep into the victim’s skin in every place. Espérandieu stepped forward in turn and looked over his boss’s shoulder. One word immediately sprang to mind: bondage. There were so many knots and loops in some places, so complicated and tight, that Servaz figured it would take the pathologist hours to cut through them, then examine them once he got back to the lab. He had never seen such a tangled skein. Trussing her up like that would not have taken that long, however; whoever had done this could have acted in brutal haste before laying her in the bath and opening the tap.

  He hadn’t turned it off properly, because it was still dripping.

  A deafening noise in the silent room every time a drop fell on the surface of the water.

  Perhaps he had beaten her first. Servaz would have liked to put one hand into the bath, lift her head out of the water and hold up her skull to feel the occipital and the parietal – two of the eight flat bones that make up the cranium – through her long brown hair. But that was the pathologist’s job.

  The light from his torch rebounded on the water. He switched it off and there was only one source of light now. It was as if the water had sequins in it …

  Servaz closed his eyes, counted to three, then opened them again: the light was not in the bath, but in the victim’s mouth. A tiny little torch, no more than two centimetres in diameter. It had been rammed down her throat. Only the end emerged, and it lit up the dead woman’s palate, tongue, gums and teeth, while its beam was diffracted through the surrounding water.

  Like a lamp with a human lampshade …

  Puzzled, Servaz wondered what the meaning of this final gesture might be. A signature? Its pointlessness and its undeniable importance left him thoughtful. The symbol remained to be found. He thought about what he could see there before him, as well as the dolls in the swimming pool, and tried to determine how significant each element might be.

  Water …

  Water was the main thing. And he could also make out organic substances at the bottom of the bath, a faint whiff of urine. She must have died in that cold water.

  Water here and water outside. It was raining. Had the murderer waited for this stormy night to act?

  He considered how he had not seen any traces on the stairs on his way up. If the body had been tied up somewhere else, then dragged up here, in all likelihood there would have been scrapes on the skirting boards, or twists and tears in the carpet. He would ask the technicians to examine the stairway and take samples, but he already knew the answer.

  He looked at the young woman again. He felt dizzy. She had had a future. Who deserved to die so young? Her expression in the water told him what else had happened: that before she died she had been afraid, terribly afraid. She had understood that it was all over, that she had used up all her credit before she’d even had a chance to find out what getting older was about. What had she been thinking about? About the past, or the future? About all the missed opportunities, the second chances she would not have, the plans that would never come to be, about lovers or the love of her life? Or was she just thinking about surviving?
Judging by the wounds the rope had left, she must have struggled with the wild desperation of an animal caught in a trap. But she was already confined in her narrow prison of cords by then, and she would have felt the level of the water rising slowly, inexorably, around her. While panic was howling like a hurricane in her brain and she would have liked to cry out for real, the little torch in her mouth had prevented her from doing so, more efficiently than any gag, and she could only breathe through her nose while her throat was hurting, swollen around a foreign object, and her brain was beginning to lack oxygen. She must have choked when the water came into her mouth, then panic would have changed to pure terror when the water entered her nostrils, covered her face, and lapped against her wide-open eyes …

  Suddenly the light came back on and they both jumped.

  ‘Bloody fucking hell!’ exclaimed Espérandieu.

  ‘Can you tell me why I should let you handle this case, Commandant?’

  Servaz raised his head and looked at Castaing. The magistrate took out a cigarette and wedged it between his lips. The cigarette crackled in the rain when he lit it. He looked like a totem pole, standing in the glow from the headlights.

  ‘Why? Because everyone expects you to. Because it’s the most reasonable choice. Because if you don’t and the investigation turns into a monstrous cock-up, everyone will ask you why you didn’t.’

  Castaing’s beady little eyes were sparkling, and Servaz could not decide whether it was in anger or amusement, or a mixture of the two. The huge man’s body language was astonishingly difficult to read.

  ‘Cathy d’Humières is unstinting in her praise of you.’

  His tone betrayed his scepticism.

  ‘She said your investigation team is the best one she’s ever worked with. That’s no small compliment, is it?’

  Servaz remained silent.

  ‘I want to be kept informed of all your movements and every breakthrough in the investigation, is that clear?’