The Circle

by Bernard Minier

  ‘Hey, girls, you’re not on Lesbos here!’

  A drunken voice, heavy with laughter. They pulled apart, swung round in the direction of a little group that had just come out of the shadow. Young Brits, full of alcohol. The scourge of Mediterranean beaches … There were three of them.

  ‘Look at those fucking dykes!’

  ‘Hi, girls,’ said the smallest one, stepping away from the other two.

  Ziegler looked around her quickly. There was no one else on the beach.

  ‘A nice moonlit night, huh, girls? Super romantic and all that. Aren’t you bored all alone?’ he said, turning to look at his friends.

  The other two burst out laughing.

  ‘Fuck off, arsehole,’ said Zuzka coldly in perfect English.

  Ziegler started. She placed a hand on her girlfriend’s arm.

  ‘You hear that, lads? They’re not the kind to give in easily, eh? Hey, want something to drink?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Ziegler replied.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  His tone was too conciliatory. The gendarme felt every muscle of her body tense and harden. Out of the corner of her eye, she kept watch on the other two.

  ‘What about you, bleedin’ cow – want some?’

  Irène’s hand squeezed Zuzka’s arm. Zuzka said nothing this time. She had grasped the danger.

  ‘Cat got yer tongue? Or you only use it to insult people and go down on her?’

  A strain of music drifted over from one of the tavernas. It occurred to Ziegler that even if they screamed no one would hear them.

  ‘You’re pretty stacked for a dyke,’ said the redhead, looking Zuzka up and down.

  Ziegler watched the other two. They weren’t moving. They were waiting to see what would happen. They were followers … Or maybe they were already too drunk to react. How many hours had they been drinking? It did matter, after all. She turned her attention to the leader. He was a bit too chubby, with an ugly face, a strand of hair falling in his eyes, thick glasses and a long pointed nose that made him look like a fucking rat. He was wearing white shorts and a ridiculous Manchester United sweatshirt.

  ‘Maybe you could change the menu, for once. Have you ever sucked off a man, love?’

  Zuzka didn’t budge.

  ‘Hey, I’m talking to you!’

  Irène had already grasped that things wouldn’t stop there. Not with this dickhead. She evaluated the situation in silence. The other two were definitely taller and sturdier, but they did look heavy and slow. In the short term, the ginger wanker was the most dangerous. She wondered if he had anything in his pocket, a knife. She was sorry she had left her can of mace at the hotel.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ she said, to distract his attention from Zuzka.

  The Englishman swung around to face her. She saw his little eyes sparkling with fury in the moonlight. Yet his gaze was blurred with alcohol. So much the better.

  ‘What d’you say?’

  ‘Leave us alone,’ said Ziegler again, her English shaky but adequate.

  She had to get him to come closer.

  ‘Shut up, bitch! Stay out of this.’

  ‘Fuck you, bastard,’ she replied.

  The Englishman’s face was distorted; he opened his mouth. Under different circumstances his expression might have looked hilarious.

  ‘Whaaa d’you say?’

  His voice hissed like a snake. She was trembling with rage.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she repeated, very loudly.

  She saw the other two move and an alarm bell went off in her mind. Watch out: maybe they weren’t as drunk as they seemed; they had managed to grasp, after all, that the situation was evolving.

  The chubby little guy moved too; he took a step in her direction. Without knowing it, he had just entered her zone. Make a move, she thought, so intently she wondered if she hadn’t said it out loud. Make a move …

  He raised his hand to hit her. In spite of the booze and his excess weight, he was quick. And he was reckoning on the effect of surprise. With anyone else it would have worked – but not Irène. She stepped easily to one side and aimed a kick in the direction of the most vulnerable part of any male. Bingo, bull’s eye. The redhead let out a shout and fell to his knees in the black sand. Irène saw one of the other two rush towards her and she was about to deal with him when she saw Zuzka empty her can of mace in his face as he went by. The second Englishman screamed, lifting his hands to his face and bending double. Weighing up the situation, the third man hesitated to get involved. Ziegler turned her attention back to the first. He was already back on his feet; she didn’t wait for him to be fully upright but grabbed his wrist and rotated it in a movement she had learned at the academy, twisting his arm behind his back. She didn’t stop, now that she had the advantage. If she let them get their wits about them, she and Zuzka would be fucked. Maintaining her momentum, she twisted his arm until a bone cracked somewhere. The redhead let out a roar like an injured animal. She let him go.

  ‘She broke my arm! Fuck! She broke my arm, that dyke,’ he whined, holding his shattered limb.

  Ziegler sensed a movement to her right. She turned her head just in time to see a fist come in her direction. The shock made her head fly back and for a split second she felt as if she were being plunged underwater. It was the third yob – he’d eventually made a move. She fell stunned into the sand, and immediately afterwards felt a kick to her ribs. She rolled over to cushion the blow.

  She waited for more blows. But to her great surprise, there weren’t any. She raised her head and saw that Zuzka had jumped on the back of the third one and was clinging to him. With a quick glance Irène saw the second one was beginning to recover. She got to her feet and rushed to her girlfriend’s aid, directing a kick straight into the guy’s chest. He collapsed, his breath taken away. Zuzka pushed him over in the sand to get away from him.

  The redhead hadn’t completely given up. He rushed at Ziegler. This time, he held a blade in his good hand: she saw it gleam in the moonlight for a second. She stood easily to one side, grabbed the Englishman by his broken arm and pulled.

  ‘Ahhhhhh!’ he screamed, falling for the second time.

  She let him go. She grabbed Zuzka by the hand.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  The next instant they were fleeing, running flat out towards the lights, the music and their scooter.

  ‘You’re going to have nice black eye,’ said Zuzka, caressing her swollen eyebrow.

  Ziegler looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. A bump was starting to show, mustard yellow to violet. And around her eye, all the colours of the rainbow.

  ‘Just what I needed to go back to work.’

  ‘Lift your left arm,’ said Zuzka.

  She obeyed. And winced.

  ‘Does it hurt there?’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘You maybe have broken rib,’ said Zuzka.

  ‘I can’t have.’

  ‘Anyway, as soon as we get home, you go and see a doctor.’

  Ziegler nodded, pulling on her tank top with some difficulty. Zuzka opened the minibar and took out two miniatures of Absolut and two bottles of fruit juice.

  ‘And since we can’t go out in this fucking rathole without getting attacked, we’ll drink here. It will calm the pain. Whoever is less drunk puts the other one to bed.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  The phone woke him up. He had dropped off on the sofa. He sat up, reached out towards the coffee table where his mobile phone was buzzing and vibrating like an evil insect.

  ‘Servaz.’

  ‘Martin? It’s me. Did I wake you?’

  Marianne’s voice … The voice of someone at breaking point – and who had been drinking, also.

  ‘Hugo’s been remanded in custody. Did you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then for fuck’s sake why didn’t you call me?’

  There was more than mere anger in her words. There was rage.

  ‘I was going to, Mar
ianne, I promise you … and then I … I forgot.’

  ‘Forgot? Fuck, Martin, my son gets sent to jail and you forget to tell me?’

  That wasn’t entirely true. He had wanted to call, but he had hesitated for a long time. And he’d eventually fallen asleep, exhausted.

  ‘Listen, Marianne, I … I don’t think he’s guilty. I … you have to trust me, I’ll find the culprit.’

  ‘Trust you? I don’t know where I am any more … My thoughts are all over the place, I’m losing my mind, I picture Hugo all alone at night in that prison and I want to go mad. And you … you forget to call me, you don’t say a thing, you act as if nothing had happened – and you let the judge send my son to jail even though you told me you believed he was innocent! And you want me to trust you?’

  He would have liked to say something, to stick up for himself. But he knew it would be a mistake. The time wasn’t right. There was a time for discussion and a time for silence. He had already made this mistake in the past: wanting to justify himself, whatever the cost, wanting to impose his point of view no matter what, to have the final word. It didn’t work. It never worked. He had learned … He said nothing.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘I’ve been doing nothing else.’

  ‘Goodnight, Martin.’

  She hung up.

  Monday

  19

  Vertigo

  On Monday morning Servaz had an appointment at the morgue for the autopsy results. Translucent windows. Long echoing corridors. Some laughter came from behind a closed door, then silence, and he was alone as he went down to the basement.

  In his memory a little boy was dancing and running around his mother. Dancing and laughing in beams of sunlight. His mother, too, was laughing.

  He banished the image and went through the swing doors.

  ‘Good morning, Commandant,’ said Delmas.

  Servaz glanced over at the big table where Claire Diemar lay. From where he stood he could see her pretty profile. Except that her skull had been meticulously sawn open and he could see the grey mass of her brain gleaming in the neon light. The same went for her torso, split into a Y, her pink viscera showing on the surface of her abdomen. There were samples on a work surface, sealed in hermetically closed tubes. The rest had been put in a bin for anatomical waste.

  Servaz thought of his mother. She had suffered the same fate. He looked away.

  ‘Right,’ said the little man, ‘do you want to know whether she died in her bath? I may as well inform you straight away, deaths by drowning are a right nuisance. And when the drowning occurred in a bath, it’s even worse.’

  Servaz looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Diatoms,’ explained Delmas. ‘Rivers, lakes and oceans are full of them. When water is inhaled, they spread throughout the organism. At present they are still the best sign of drowning we have. Except that urban water is very low in diatoms, so do you see my problem?’

  The pathologist removed his gloves, tossed them into a pedal bin and went up to the tap.

  ‘What’s more, any traces of blows to the body are difficult to interpret because of the immersion. Fortunately she wasn’t in the water for very long.’

  ‘Are there traces of blows?’ asked Servaz.

  Delmas gestured towards the back of his own neck, his chubby pink hands covered in antiseptic soap.

  ‘A haematoma on the parietal and a cerebral oedema. A very violent blow with a heavy object. I’d say her fate was sealed at that moment, but I suspect she actually died from drowning.’

  ‘You suspect?’

  The pathologist shrugged.

  ‘I told you, the diagnosis is rarely straightforward in cases of drowning. Perhaps the analyses will tell us a bit more. The blood strontium, for example – if the concentration in the blood is very different from the usual, and very close to that of the water where she was found, we can be almost certain that she died at the time she was immersed in that bloody bath.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Same thing for the postmortem lividity: the water delayed it. And then the histological exam didn’t come up with much, either …’

  He seemed quite put out.

  ‘And the torch?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘What about the torch?’

  ‘What do you think of it?’

  ‘Nothing. Interpretation is your job. I limit myself to facts. In any case, she panicked, and struggled so hard that the ropes left very deep wounds in her flesh. The question is to determine when she struggled. Which would in all likelihood exclude the hypothesis of a mortal blow to her skull.’

  Servaz was beginning to have enough of the pathologist’s cautiousness. Delmas was a competent guy, he knew. And it was precisely because he was competent that he was also extremely cautious.

  ‘I’d prefer a conclusion that would be slightly more …’

  ‘Precise? You’ll get one, when they’ve done the tests. In the meantime I’d say there’s a ninety-five per cent chance that she was put in that bath while still alive, and that she died from drowning. Not a bad likelihood, eh?’

  Servaz thought about how the young woman must have panicked, fear exploding in her chest as the water rose, the dreadful sensation of suffocation. He thought about the pitilessness of the perpetrator, watching her die like that. The pathologist was right: interpretation was Servaz’s job. And his interpretation told him that he was not dealing with an average killer.

  ‘By the way, have you read the paper?’ asked Delmas.

  Servaz threw him a cautious glance. He hadn’t forgotten the article he’d seen in Elvis’s room. The pathologist turned round, reached for La Dépêche on a work surface and handed it to him.

  ‘You should like this – page 5.’

  Servaz turned the pages. He didn’t have to go far. Huge headline: ‘HIRTMANN WRITES TO POLICE.’ For God’s sake! The article was only a few lines, and reported an e-mail sent to ‘Commandant Servaz of the regional crime squad’ by someone calling himself Julian Hirtmann. ‘According to police sources, it has not been possible at this stage to determine whether it was from the Swiss killer or a hoaxer …’ Servaz couldn’t believe it. He began to boil with rage.

  ‘Great, isn’t it?’ said the pathologist. ‘I’d love to know which wanker passed on the information. In any case, it must be someone from your squad.’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Servaz.

  Espérandieu was listening to ‘Knocked Up’ by the Kings of Leon when Servaz burst into the office.

  ‘Have you seen your face?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  Espérandieu looked at his boss and understood that this was not a time for questions. He removed his headset and stood up. Servaz had already gone back out. He was striding towards the double doors and the corridor leading to the director’s office. They went through the bulletproof door one after the other, past the little waiting room with its leather sofas, and past the reception desk.

  ‘He’s in a meeting!’ shouted the secretary as she saw them go by.

  Servaz did not stop. He knocked on the door and went in.

  ‘ … lawyers, notaries, auctioneers … We’ve been using kid gloves, but we haven’t lost a thing,’ Stehlin was saying to several members of the Financial Affairs Division. ‘Martin, I’m in a meeting.’

  Servaz went over to the big table and tossed the newspaper, open to page 5, in front of the director of the crime squad. Stehlin leaned over to look at it, examined the headline. And raised his head, jaws clenched.

  ‘Gentlemen, we will conclude this meeting at another time.’

  The four men got up and went out, their expressions full of surprise.

  ‘The leak must be internal,’ said Servaz at once.

  Divisional Commissioner Stehlin was in his shirtsleeves. He had opened all the windows to let in the still relatively temperate morning air, and the noise from the boulevard filled the room. The air-conditioning had been out of order for several days. He nodded his head towards the
chairs opposite his desk.

  ‘Do you have any idea who it could be?’ he enquired.

  In one corner, a scanner was spitting out messages; the commissioner kept it turned on all the time. Servaz said nothing. He had noted Stehlin’s tone and knew what this meant: beware of any unfounded accusations … He could not help but compare his new boss to his predecessor, Divisional Commissioner Wilmer, with his carefully groomed goatee and the smile plastered to his lips like a cold sore. For Servaz, the fact that Wilmer had filled this position was proof that an imbecile can go far if he has other imbeciles above him. At his farewell party, the atmosphere had been chilly and formal, and when Wilmer had embarked on his little thank you speech, the applause was reticent. Stehlin had kept his distance, not wearing a tie, in his shirtsleeves like he was today, looking like just another cop. And he had carefully observed his future colleagues. Servaz had observed him, too. He had concluded that his new boss must have grasped how much work lay ahead to repair the damage done by his predecessor. Servaz liked Stehlin. He was a good cop, had been in the field and knew his stuff – he was not some technocrat who opened his umbrella the minute there was a drop of rain.

  ‘I am sure of one thing,’ said Servaz. ‘It isn’t Vincent or Samira; I trust them one hundred per cent.’

  ‘Then that doesn’t leave too many possibilities,’ said Stehlin.

  ‘No.’

  Stehlin looked unhappy. He crossed his fingers over the desk.

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  Servaz reflected.

  ‘Let’s leak some item only he could know. Some erroneous item … If it shows up tomorrow in the newspaper, we’ll have killed two birds with one stone: we’ll know for sure that it is him, and we’ll be able to make a formal rebuttal, thus discrediting both the journalist and his source …’

  He hadn’t suggested any names, but he knew that the divisional commissioner and he were thinking of the same person. Stehlin nodded.

  ‘An interesting idea … and what sort of information did you have in mind?’

  ‘It has to be sufficiently credible for him to take the bait … and sufficiently important for the press to want to talk about it.’