The Circle

by Bernard Minier

  And then there was the man himself.

  Julian Alois Hirtmann. Born forty-five years earlier in Hermance, in the French part of Switzerland. He and Servaz had only one thing in common: a love of Mahler’s music. Both of them knew everything there was to know about the Austrian composer’s oeuvre. Beyond that, they shared nothing: one was a cop from the crime squad, and the other a serial killer. Hirtmann was a former prosecutor from Geneva, who organised orgies at his villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, and who had been arrested for the double murder of his wife and her lover on the night of 21 June 2004. Subsequently, documents had been discovered at his home suggesting that Hirtmann was the author of forty or more murders spread over a period of twenty-five years. Which made him one of the most feared serial killers of modern times. He had been sent to several psychiatric establishments before ending up at the Wargnier Institute, a facility unique in all of Europe, where murderers who had been declared insane by the courts in their respective countries were locked up. Servaz had been involved in the investigation which had preceded – and in a way led to – Hirtmann’s escape; he had met the man in his cell shortly before.

  Then Hirtmann went over the wall and vanished into thin air, disappeared in a cloud of smoke like the genie in the lamp. Servaz had always been convinced that he would eventually resurface. Sooner or later, without the appropriate treatment, his impulses and hunting instincts would reawaken.

  Which did not mean that it would be easy to catch him.

  As Simon Propp, the forensic psychologist who had taken part in the investigation, had emphasised, Hirtmann was not only a manipulator and an intelligent sociopath: he was in a class of his own. He belonged to that rare category of serial killers who are capable of having an intense and gratifying social life alongside their criminal activity. It was usual for the personality disorders from which compulsive murderers suffered to affect their intellectual faculties and social life in some way or other. But for twenty years or more the Swiss murderer had managed to occupy a position of great responsibility in the Geneva law courts, while continuing to kidnap, torture and murder over forty women. Tracking Hirtmann down had become a priority: several cops were devoting most of their time to it, both in Paris and Geneva. Servaz had no idea where they stood with their investigation – but he had their telephone numbers somewhere.

  Again he pictured Hirtmann in his cell, his dark brown hair and very pale, almost translucent skin. He was thin and unshaven, wearing a boiler suit and T-shirt, of a whitish colour that had gone grey from frequent washing. Yet he was urbane, smiling, extremely polite. Servaz was sure that even if he were homeless Hirtmann would preserve that veneer of education and savoir-vivre. He had never met someone who looked so little like a serial killer. But there was something in his expression as electrifying as a Taser, and he never blinked. Something both severe and punitive about his face, yet the lower half, his mouth in particular, belonged to a sensualist. He could have been a hypocritical resident of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, sending so-called witches to the stake; or a member of the Holy Inquisition; or an accuser at a Stalinist trial … or what he had been: a prosecutor who had a reputation for being intransigent, but who organised sado-masochistic soirées at his villa, where his own wife was subjected to the whims of powerful, corrupt men. Insatiable men who, like him, were in search of emotions and pleasures that went far beyond convention or public morality. Businessmen, judges, politicians, artists. Men with power and money. Men whose appetites knew no bounds.

  Servaz wondered what Hirtmann looked like nowadays. Had he resorted to cosmetic surgery? Or had he merely let his hair and beard grow, or dyed them and started wearing contact lenses? Had he put on weight, changed the way he walked or spoke, found a job? So many questions … If he wore make-up and dressed in a totally different manner, would Servaz recognise him if he passed him in a crowd? A shudder went through him.

  He handed the bag with the CD back to the technician.

  There was a knot in his stomach.

  It was that same piece of music, the Kindertotenlieder, that Julian Hirtmann had selected the night he had murdered his wife and her lover. Servaz knew that once they had finished with the initial search and the house-to-house, he would have to get hold of a few people. He did not understand how one crime scene could involve both the son of a woman he had been in love with for a long time, and this music that evoked the most horrific murderer ever to cross his path, but he did know one thing: not only had the public prosecutor’s office allowed him to lead the investigation, he was also personally involved.

  They drove back to Toulouse at around four o’clock in the morning. They locked Hugo up in one of the detention cells. At the police station the cells were in a row on the opposite side of the corridor from the offices: that way, detainees did not have to go far to be interrogated. Servaz checked his watch.

  ‘Right. Let’s let him get some rest,’ he said.

  ‘And then what do we do?’ asked Espérandieu, stifling a yawn.

  ‘We still have some work ahead. Keep track of the hours he spends resting, and make sure he initials them – and ask him if he’s hungry.’

  Servaz turned around. Samira was unloading her weapon in the bullet bin, a sort of metallic padded and armoured Kevlar dustbin. To avoid any accidents, when agents came back from a mission they emptied their guns into the bin. Unlike most of her colleagues, Samira wore her holster on her hips. Servaz thought it made her look rather like a cowboy. As far as he knew, she had never yet had to use her gun, but she had excellent results at the shooting range – unlike Servaz, who could have missed an elephant in a corridor. He was the despair of his trainer, who had baptised him ‘Daredevil’. Since Servaz didn’t understand, the instructor explained that ‘Daredevil’ was a superhero in a comic strip who was very intuitive but blind. Servaz himself had never used the bullet bin. First of all because he generally forgot to take his weapon, and secondly because he simply locked it up when he came back from a mission and most of the time the magazine was empty anyway.

  He walked across the hall and into his office.

  The night was not yet over, and he still had a pile of paperwork to get through. The very idea of it depressed him. He went over to the window and looked out at the canal in the rain. The night sky was fading, but the day had not yet risen, so what he saw in the windowpane was his own reflection. His forehead, mouth and eyes were blurry, but before he had time to arrange his features, he surprised an expression that displeased him. That of a man who was anxious and tense. A man who was on his guard.

  ‘Someone wants to speak to you,’ said a voice behind him.

  He turned around. One of the officers on duty.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The family lawyer. He’s asked to see the kid.’

  Servaz frowned.

  ‘The boy didn’t ask for a lawyer, and visiting hours are over,’ he said. ‘He ought to know that.’

  ‘He does. But he’s asking for a favour: to speak with you for five minutes. That’s what he said. And he says it’s the kid’s mother who sent him.’

  Servaz paused. Should he comply with the lawyer’s request? He could understand Marianne’s anxiety. What had she told the lawyer about Servaz and herself?

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Downstairs. In the lobby.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll be down.’

  When he came out of the lift, Servaz ran into two officers setting up a little television behind the counter. He saw something green on the screen and tiny figures in blue running in every direction. Given the time, it must be a repeat. He gave a sigh, and mused that entire countries were on the verge of collapse, that the names of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were finance, politics, religion and the depletion of resources, and they were whipping their horses as hard as they could, but the ant farm continued to dance on a volcano and be fascinated by things as insignificant as football. Servaz thought that the day the world came to an end – in a blaze of climate catastrophes, s
tock market collapses, massacres and riots – there would still be men stupid enough to score goals and others who were even more inane going to the stadiums to cheer them on.

  The lawyer was sitting in the gloomy, deserted lobby. During the day, the chairs were besieged by anyone who had a reason to be there. No one came to the police station for the pleasure of it, and the officers on duty had to deal with crowds of desperate, furious or frightened people. But at this time of day, the little man was all alone, his briefcase on his lap, his knees close together, and in the dim light he was cleaning his glasses.

  The lawyer heard the lift doors open. He put his glasses back on his nose and looked up in Servaz’s direction. Servaz motioned to him to follow him and the man walked round the reception with his hand extended. A cool, limp handshake. After that, he smoothed his tie as if he were wiping his hand.

  Servaz got straight to the point. ‘Sir, you know you have no business here. The boy did not request your presence.’

  The little man evaluated him carefully, and Servaz was immediately on his guard.

  ‘I know, I know, Commandant. But Hugo wasn’t really thinking straight when you asked him. He was under the influence of the drugs he’d been given, as the tests will show. So I’m asking you to put the question to him again, now that he may have regained his faculties.’

  ‘Nothing obliges us to do so.’

  A brief flash behind his glasses.

  ‘I am aware of that. So I am calling upon your … humanity, and your sense of justice – not merely the code.’

  ‘My … humanity?’

  ‘Yes. Those were the very words used by the person who sent me. You know, I think, who I am talking about.’

  The lawyer kept his gaze on him, waiting for an answer.

  He knew about Marianne and him …

  Servaz felt a burst of anger. ‘I advise you not to—’

  ‘As you can imagine,’ the lawyer broke in, ‘she is very upset by what is going on. And “upset” is a weak word … desperate, shattered, terrified, would be more appropriate. It’s just a little gesture, Commandant. I am not trying to put a spanner in the works. I am not here to make things more difficult for you; I simply want to see him. She is begging you to agree to my request: that is also the word she used. Put yourself in her position. Imagine how you would feel if it were your daughter who was in Hugo’s place. Ten minutes. Not a minute more.’

  Servaz stared at him. The lawyer held his gaze. The cop tried to read scorn, affliction or embarrassment in his eyes, but there was nothing. Other than his own reflection in the lenses of the man’s glasses.

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  Saturday

  10

  Memories

  It was as if the sky were pouring out bile rather than tears, as if someone up there were squeezing a dirty sponge over their heads: the rain fell relentlessly on the roads and the woods from a sky the yellow-grey colour of a decomposing corpse. The air was sultry, sticky and humid. It was Saturday, 12 June, and not yet eight o’clock in the morning. Servaz was already on the road for Marsac, on his own this time.

  He’d slept for barely two hours in one of the cells, had rinsed his armpits and his face in the washroom, dried himself with paper towels from the distributor, and now he was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

  With one hand on the steering wheel, the other clutching a thermos of lukewarm coffee, he blinked to the same sleepy rhythm as the windscreen wipers. He was also holding a cigarette in the thermos hand, and he inhaled the smoke with a rage. Everything was coming back to him now, and he was acutely aware, stunningly lucid, as if his memory were on fire. The years of his youth. They had the flavour of the countryside he was going through. In autumn, the dead leaves scattered to the side of the road as he drove by, music on full blast; the long, silent, gloomy corridors bathed in a grey light as the rain fell relentlessly all through the endless November weeks; and then, the white illumination of the first snow in December, rock music resonating joyfully through the dormitories from behind people’s doors as Christmas approached; the buds in spring and flowers bursting forth everywhere, like a siren’s call, a lost paradise, inviting them to leave this place, just as the work rhythm was intensifying and the written exams of April and May were fast approaching. And finally, the stifling heat of June, the pale blue sky baking with heat, the dazzling light and the buzzing of insects …

  Faces, too.

  Dozens of faces … youthful, honest, clever, spiritual, fervent, concentrated, friendly, all filled with hopes, dreams and impatience. And then, Marsac itself: its pubs, its art-house cinema showing Bergman, Tarkovsky and Godard; its streets, its squares. He had loved those years. Oh, God, how he had loved them. Even if, at the time, he had lived through them with a sort of unconsciousness punctuated by moments of astonishing happiness, or despair as violent as coming down from an acid trip.

  The worst one was called Marianne …

  Twenty years on, the wound, which he had thought would never heal, had closed, and he could look back on that time with the detached curiosity of an archaeologist. Or at least so he had thought, until yesterday.

  The Cherokee bumped over the old cobblestones when he reached the town. It didn’t look at all like it had the night before. The smooth faces of the students in their shining rain gear, the rows of bicycles, the shop windows, the pubs, the dark awnings dripping over the outdoor cafés: he was stunned to see it all, as if nothing had changed in twenty years, as if the past had been looking out for him, waiting for him, hoping, all these years, to grab him by the neck and immerse him headfirst in his memories.

  11

  Friends and Enemies

  Servaz climbed out of the car and looked at a group of lycée students trotting past him, their blank-faced gym teacher in the lead, and he remembered a similar instructor who liked to humiliate and harden his students. He went into the building.

  ‘I am Commandant Servaz,’ he said to the secretary sitting in the office beyond the lobby, ‘I’m here to see the director.’

  She gave his wet clothes a suspicious look.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘I’m in charge of the investigation into the death of Professor Diemar.’

  He saw her gaze cloud over behind her glasses. She picked up the telephone and spoke in a low voice. Then she stood up.

  ‘There is no need. I know the way,’ he said.

  He saw her hesitate for a second, then sit back down, looking as if something were troubling her.

  ‘Madame Diemar …’ she said. ‘Claire … She was such a good person. I hope you’re going to punish whoever did this.’

  She had not said find, she had said punish. He was sure that everyone in Marsac knew that Hugo had been arrested. Servaz moved away. Silence reigned in this part of the lycée; courses were held elsewhere, in the concrete cubes out on the lawn and in the ultramodern amphitheatre which hadn’t been there in his day. Out of breath, he reached the top of the spiral stairs inside the circular tower. The door opened almost at once. The headmaster had put on an appropriately grave expression, but his surprise destroyed the effect.

  ‘I know you. You are—’

  ‘Margot’s father, yes. I’m also in charge of the investigation.’

  The headmaster’s face fell.

  ‘What an awful business. Not to mention the reputation it will give our establishment: a professor killed by one of her students!’

  Obviously …

  ‘I didn’t know that the investigation was already over,’ said Servaz as he walked into the room. ‘Or that the specifics had been made public.’

  ‘Hugo was arrested at Mademoiselle Diemar’s place, was he not? Well then: everything points to him.’

  Servaz shot him a gaze that had the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

  ‘I understand that you would like the investigation to be wound up as quickly as possible,’ he said. ‘In the interests of the establishment …’

  ‘Precisely.’<
br />
  ‘But let us do our work. You must understand that I cannot tell you more.’

  The headmaster nodded vigorously, blushing.

  ‘Yes, of course. Of course, naturally … it goes without saying … of course, of course.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ said Servaz.

  The big man looked panicked.

  ‘What … what do you want to know?’

  ‘Was she a good teacher?’

  ‘Yes, well, we did not always agree when it came to her … pedagogical … methods, but her students, the students … uh … they liked her.’

  ‘What sort of relationships did she have with them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was she close to them? Distant? Strict? Friendly? Maybe she was too close for your liking? You just said that they liked her.’

  ‘A normal rapport.’

  ‘Were there any students or professors who might have had a grudge against her?’

  ‘I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘She was a good-looking woman. Colleagues, or even students, might have made a pass at her. Did she ever report anything of the sort?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She had no inappropriate relationships with her students?’

  He grunted in the negative. ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  The difference between his two answers did not go unnoticed; Servaz told himself he would delve further into this question later on.

  ‘May I see her office?’

  The headmaster took a key from the drawer and went to the door, swaying heavily.

  ‘Follow me.’

  They went down to the floor below, then along a corridor. Servaz remembered where the teachers’ offices were. Nothing had changed. The same smell of beeswax, the same white walls, the same creaking floorboards.

  ‘Oh!’ said the headmaster suddenly.

  Servaz followed his gaze and saw a mass of colour at the foot of one of the doors: bouquets of flowers, little handwritten or printed letters, and a few candles on the waxed floor. They looked at each other and for a moment a certain solemnity came over them. That didn’t take long, thought Servaz, and he guessed that the news had already spread through the dormitories. He bent down, picked up one of the little notes and unfolded it. A few words written in purple ink: ‘A light has gone out. But it will never stop shining in us. Thank you.’ Nothing else. He was strangely moved. He decided not to read the other ones; he would delegate the task to someone else.