The Circle

by Bernard Minier

‘What time did the argument take place?’ Samira was asking.

  ‘Half past nine, ten o’clock …’

  ‘Were there any witnesses?’

  A hoarse guffaw, followed by a cough.

  ‘Dozens!’

  ‘And before that, what were you doing?’

  ‘Are you deaf? I was drinking, and eyeing up that girl. Dozens of people saw me, I tell you. I know I made mistakes in the past. But shit, those girls I assaulted, what were they doing out at night, huh? In Albania, women don’t go out at night. They’re respectable.’

  Samira Cheung chose a spot at random and jabbed her index finger into the Albanian’s side. Hard. Servaz saw Elvis wince with pain. He was going to intervene when Samira removed her finger.

  ‘Your alibi had better be solid,’ she said in an ugly, cold voice. ‘You really have a problem, Elvis. I don’t suppose you’re impotent, are you? Or maybe you’re a repressed fag … Yes, that’s it. Of course that’s it. Did you enjoy taking showers in the nick?’

  Servaz watched as the man’s face was transformed, his gaze turning as black as a pool of oil, no light in his eyes. In spite of the heat in the room, it was as if icy water were trickling down his spine. His pulse began beating faster. He swallowed. He’d seen that sort of look before, a long time ago. He had been ten years old … The little boy in him could not forget. Once again he thought about the men who had shown up in the garden of his family home one July evening. Two men like this one, wolves, lost creatures with empty gazes. He remembered his mother, crying and begging, and his father, tied to a chair. And little Martin, locked in the cupboard beneath the stairs, hearing everything, guessing everything – and how many times had he come across people like them since he had joined the police? Suddenly he was desperately in need of air, he had to get out of that room, that hospital. He began running towards the toilets before the nausea had time to overwhelm him.

  ‘It’s not him.’

  Servaz nodded. They were heading back up the corridor towards the lobby. He had a terrible desire to smoke, but there were no smoking signs everywhere, constantly calling him to order.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘His alibi is solid and, in any case, I don’t see how he could have emptied Claire Diemar’s mailbox at the lycée, or why he would have followed Hugo and drugged him.’

  ‘That guy should not be out of jail,’ said Samira as they walked past the cafeteria.

  ‘There are no laws about putting people in prison just because they’re dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘He’ll do it again, sooner or later.’

  ‘He served his sentence.’

  Samira shook her head as they crossed the lobby.

  ‘The only valid therapy for his sort is chopping off their balls,’ she decreed.

  Servaz looked at his assistant. Apparently she wasn’t joking. With relief he saw the glass doors coming closer and dug his hand in his pocket, but there was one last no smoking sign on the other side – he felt as if he were an adolescent again, on the running track, his lungs on fire, sure he would never manage to run the last twenty metres.

  The doors opened at last. Heat and damp engulfed them. He stiffened. His lungs were clamouring for nicotine, demanding their poison, but there was something else … What was it? Ever since they had gone past the first no smoking sign earlier that afternoon, his unconscious had been at work – but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was seeking.

  ‘If it’s not Elmaz, then we’re back to square one,’ said Samira.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Hugo …’

  Servaz managed to check his watch as he took out his cigarette.

  ‘Let’s go back to the office. You put pressure on the tracking service. I want results by the end of the day. If it is Hugo, can you tell me why he would have emptied out Clare’s computer but not cleared his own mobile?’

  She raised her hands in a gesture of ignorance. An ambulance arrived, siren wailing, and stopped in front of the barrier, waiting for it to lift.

  Suddenly it dawned on him. He knew why he had been so obsessed by the no smoking signs.

  As he walked across the long footbridge above the trees, he took out his mobile, found Margot’s phone number and hit dial. Horrible music replied, and he made a face. He was pleased to know that Margot switched her mobile off during class, but it was bad timing. With one finger he typed a text message:

  Does Hugo smoke? Call me back. Urgent.

  He had just finished when his telephone began to vibrate.

  ‘Margot?’ he said, as he reached the lifts.

  ‘No, this is Nadia,’ said a woman’s voice.

  Nadia Berrada was in charge of the tracking service. He pressed the button to call the lift.

  ‘The computers have spoken,’ she said.

  His hand was suspended in mid-air.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The mailboxes had indeed been emptied, but we were able to recover the messages, both sent and received. The last one is from the day she died. It’s the usual stuff: e-mails to colleagues, personal messages, announcements for staff meetings and seminars, and junk mail.’

  ‘Were there any messages sent or received from Hugo Bokhanowsky?’

  ‘No. Not a one. However, there was one correspondent who showed up on a regular basis. “Thomas999”. And his messages seem … how shall I put it? Intimate.’

  ‘Intimate in what way?’

  ‘Intimate enough for him to write—’ She broke off before reading: ‘“Life in the future will be so much more exciting because we are in love”, “Amazing. Incredible. Miss you absolutely”, “I am the lock and you are the key, I am yours forever, your darling, for now and all eternity” …’

  ‘Who wrote that, him or her?’

  ‘Both of them. Well, she wrote seventy-five per cent of them … He seemed slightly less expressive, but completely hooked all the same. Shit, that woman was really passionate!’

  From the tone of her voice, he supposed that the e-mails had made Nadia wistful. He remembered what he and Marianne had been like … In those days there were neither e-mails nor text messages, but they had exchanged hundreds of letters in a similar vein. Glorious, lyrical, naïve, ardent, funny letters. Even though they saw each other almost every day. They had known that intensity, that fire. He was on to something – he could tell. That woman was really passionate … Nadia had got it spot-on. He looked at the treetops swaying in the rain beneath the footbridge.

  ‘Ask Vincent to get a warrant,’ he said. ‘We need the identity of this Thomas999 as quickly as possible.’

  ‘It’s already done. We’re waiting for the answer.’

  ‘Perfect. Let me know as soon as you have it. And Nadia, please, could you take a quick look at the list of exhibits?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Whether there was a pack of cigarettes among the items found in the kid’s pockets.’

  He waited. The doors to the lift opened, but he did not go in, for fear that the metal walls would prevent the signal from getting through. Nadia came back on the line after four minutes.

  ‘No packet, no cigarette, no joints,’ she said. ‘Nothing of the kind. Does that help?’

  ‘It may do. Thank you.’

  While picturing Nadia rummaging through the exhibits, he’d had a thought concerning the notebook he had found on Claire’s desk and the sentence written there:

  Sometimes the word friend is drained of meaning, but enemy, never.

  He felt a tingling at the base of his spine. Claire Diemar had written this in a brand-new notebook not long before she died, and she had left it open on her desk. Was she aware of any imminent threat? Had she made an enemy? Could this sentence have anything at all to do with the investigation? His thoughts were getting clearer. He took out his phone again.

  ‘Are you at your desk?’ he asked when Espérandieu picked up.

  ‘Yes, why?’ said his assistant.

  ‘Could you run a sentence through Google?’


  ‘Through Google?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Like some sort of quote?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Hang on … Okay, go ahead, I’m listening.’

  Servaz repeated the sentence.

  ‘What is it? For some quiz show?’ joked his assistant. ‘Wait … aren’t you the one who studied literature?’

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘Victor Hugo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a quotation. From Victor Hugo. Would you care to explain?’

  ‘Later.’

  He hung up. Victor Hugo. Could it be just a coincidence? Claire Diemar had not written anything else in the notebook and she had left it in plain sight. She was referring to an enemy … Hugo? Servaz was aware that they were dealing with Marsac, a university town, a place, as Francis had pointed out, where people had a sense of discretion as well as of malicious gossip, where daggers were drawn but with elegance and refinement – and where any direct accusation would be seen as an unforgivable breach of taste. He must not forget that he was dealing with scholars, with people who liked puzzles, allusions, hidden meaning; people who liked to show how subtle they could be, even in dramatic circumstances. The sentence had not been written in the notebook by chance.

  Could it be that Claire, in an allusive, indirect way, had indicated the name of her enemy – even that of her future killer?

  14

  Hirtmann

  Back at the Criminal Division, Servaz went straight to Espérandieu’s office.

  ‘How is the kid doing?’

  His assistant removed his headphones, where the lead vocalist from Queens of the Stone Age was singing ‘Make It Wit Chu’, and shrugged.

  ‘He’s calm. He asked me if I had something to read. I gave him one of my comics. He didn’t want it. I should remind you that his detention ends in six hours.’

  ‘I know. Call the prosecutor. Ask for an extension.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  It was Servaz’s turn to shrug his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know. Pull something out of your bag of tricks.’

  Once he was in his office, he hunted in his drawers for a moment before he found what he was looking for. A telephone number. In Paris. He looked at it, thoughtfully. He had not called this number in a long time. He had hoped he would never have to; he had hoped the whole business was behind him.

  Servaz looked at the time, and dialled. When a man’s weary voice answered, he introduced himself.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ said the voice on the other end of the line ironically. ‘To what do I owe the honour, Commandant?’

  He explained what had happened the night before and finished with the discovery of the Mahler CD. He was expecting the man to say, ‘You called me for that?’ but he did no such thing.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me at once?’ he asked instead.

  ‘For a CD found at a crime scene? It probably has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘A crime scene where, as if by chance, the son of one of your former acquaintances has been found, where the Toulouse crime squad has, quite logically, been put on the case, and the victim happens to be a young woman in her thirties who has the same profile as his other victims? And where, to top it all off, the music that Julian was playing the night he killed his wife was playing? You must be joking!’

  Servaz noticed the use of ‘Julian’. As if after all this hunting for the man, his pursuers had ended up fraternising with him. He held his breath. The cop was right. He had had exactly the same hunch when he first saw the CD, and then he’d moved on to something else. But seen from this angle, the elements fitted together in a disturbing way. He told himself that to grasp all this so quickly the guy at the other end of the line must really know his stuff.

  ‘It’s always the same old story,’ sighed the voice on the line. ‘People get in touch when they have the time, when they’ve put aside their ego, or when all the other trails have gone cold.’

  ‘And do you have anything new at your end?’

  ‘You’d like me to say that I do, wouldn’t you? I’m sorry to disappoint you, Commandant, but we have so much information that we’re drowning in it. As if it were pouring down on us. Most of it is so far-fetched that we don’t even check it any more, other leads have to be checked all the same, and it all takes a great deal of time. He’s been spotted all over the place: Paris, Hong Kong, Timbuktu … One witness was certain he was a broker at the casino in Mar del Plata where he plays every evening, another saw him at the airport in Barcelona, or in Düsseldorf, there’s a woman who suspects her lover is Hirtmann …’

  Servaz could hear the discouragement and extreme weariness in the speaker’s voice. Then all of a sudden his voice changed, as if he had just thought of something.

  ‘It’s Toulouse, right?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  The man didn’t answer. Instead, Servaz heard him speaking to someone else. His hand over the receiver made his words inaudible, but a few seconds later he came back on the line.

  ‘Something happened quite recently,’ he said, and Servaz noticed the change of tone. ‘We put his portrait online. We Photoshopped his image and made a dozen different versions: beards, moustaches, long hair, short hair, dark, fair, a different nose and so on. You get the picture. In short, we had hundreds of replies. We looked at every single one: a long, painstaking job …’

  The weariness in his voice once again.

  ‘Among the sightings there was one more interesting than the others: a guy who runs a service station on a motorway, who swears that Hirtmann stopped there for petrol and to buy the papers. According to this fellow, he was on a motorbike, had dyed his hair, let his beard grow, and was wearing sunglasses, but the guy was categorical: he looked just like one of the portraits online, the height and shape matched, and the biker spoke with a slight accent that could have been Swiss, according to the witness. For once, we lucked out: we were able to check the shop’s video surveillance tapes. And the manager was right: it could be him – I repeat, it could be …’

  ‘And where is this service station? When was it?’

  ‘Two weeks ago. You’ll like this, Commandant: it’s called Bois de Dourre, on the A20, north of Montauban.’

  ‘Was the motorcycle filmed? Do you have the number plate?’

  ‘Whether by chance or deliberately, he parked it out of sight of the cameras. But he showed up at a tollbooth further south, in the Paris–Toulouse direction. The picture isn’t very sharp, but we have the beginning of the registration. We’re working on it … Do you see now why your story is so important? If it really was Hirtmann on that bike, there’s a very good chance he’s in your sector as we speak.’

  Dumbfounded, Servaz stared at the results of his search. He had typed the words ‘Julian Hirtmann’ into Google and obtained no less than 1,130,000 hits.

  He flung himself back in his chair and thought.

  He spent a long time looking for any report containing the slightest bit of information concerning Hirtmann after his escape; he had been through newspapers, dispatches and newsletters, had made dozens of phone calls, had harassed the unit in charge of tracking him, but the months had gone by, then the seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring again … and he had given up. Time to move on. It was no longer his business. Enough. The End. Finito. He had tried to banish him from his thoughts.

  He scanned the page of hits on the screen. He knew that freedom of expression was of key concern to Internet users, and it was up to each individual to filter, sort and use their discrimination, but he was gobsmacked by what he discovered on the web. Julian Hirtmann had thousands of fans, and there were dozens of sites that glorified him. Some articles were relatively neutral: photographs of Hirtmann during his trial and others where he was shown before the trial in the company of his ravishing spouse – the one he had electrocuted in his basement along with her lover. Hirtmann was compared to other European serial killers like Jos�
� Antonio Rodriguez Vega in Spain, who raped and killed no fewer than sixteen women aged from sixty-one to ninety-three between August 1987 and April 1988, or Joachim Kroll, the ‘cannibal of the Ruhr’. In the photographs Hirtmann had a firm, clearly outlined face, somewhat stern, regular features and an intense gaze; far from the pale, tired man Servaz had met at the Institute.

  Servaz could associate that face with a voice – deep, pleasant, steady. The voice of an actor, or an orator. The voice of a man who was used to being in charge and expressing himself in court.

  He could also associate it with the more or less blurry faces of about forty women who had disappeared over the last twenty-five years. Women of whom there was not the slightest trace but whose names had been written, with a quantity of other details, in the former prosecutor’s notebooks. Somewhere, there was a group of victims’ parents who were clamouring for Hirtmann to be forced to talk. How? With some truth serum? Hypnosis? Torture? Every solution had been envisaged by the usual zealots on the web. Including sending him to Guantánamo or burying him in the desert, his head covered in honey, next to a colony of red ants.

  Servaz knew that Hirtmann would never talk. Locked up or at liberty, he had more power over those families than any evil god would ever possess. He would always be their tormentor. Their nightmare. And that was the role he wanted. He was characterised by a total absence of remorse or guilt – like all major psychopathic perverts. He might crack if he was subjected to waterboarding or to electric shock but it was unlikely that he would crack during detention or a psychiatric interview – if they were even able to get their hands on him, which Servaz doubted.

  ARE YOU READY?

  Servaz jumped.

  The words had just appeared on the screen.

  For a moment he thought that Hirtmann had somehow managed to get into his computer.

  Then he understood that without realising it he had just clicked on one of the numerous sites on the list. Immediately afterwards, the words disappeared and on the screen he saw a picture of a dense crowd and a stage. A singer walked up to the microphone, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, even though it was night time, and the crowd began chanting the killer’s name. Servaz could not believe his ears. He hurriedly left the website, his heart pounding.