Camille

by Pierre Lemaitre

  “While we’re on the subject, Mouloud, tell me something . . . The guy who grassed you up . . . damn, what was his name again? It’s on the tip of my tongue . . .”

  *

  Faraoui never knew who squealed on him, he did everything he could to find out, but he came up with nothing; he would give four years inside just to know that name, everyone knows that. But no-one can possibly know what Faraoui would do with the guy if he ever found him.

  He smiles and nods. Done deal.

  This is Camille’s first message.

  Meeting Faraoui amounts to saying: I’ve made a deal with a killer.

  If I give him the name of the guy who grassed him up, he’ll do anything I ask.

  In exchange for that name, I can get him to hunt you down and before you have time to catch your breath he will be right behind you.

  From now on, you had better start counting the seconds.

  *

  7.30 p.m.

  Camille is sitting at his desk, colleagues pop their heads round the door, they give a little wave, everyone has heard about his dressing down, it’s all anyone can talk about. With the exception of the officers who took part in the “racial profiling”, they have nothing to worry about, but still the word gets round, the commissaire has already begun to undermine him. It’s a nasty business. But what the fuck is Camille playing at? No-one seems to know. Even Louis has hardly said a word, and so rumours are rife – an officer of his reputation, he must have done something, the commissaire is livid – to say nothing of the examining magistrate who is preparing to summon everyone involved. Even Contrôleur Général Le Guen has been like a bear with a sore head all afternoon, but pop your head round the door of his office and there’s Verhœven, typing up his report for all the world as if this is a storm in a teacup, he hasn’t got a care in the world, like this whole business with the robbery and the gang of killers is some personal beef. I don’t get it, what do you think? I haven’t a clue, but you’ve got to admit it’s pretty weird. But the officers go about their business, they have already been called away to deal with other matters, there is a commotion downstairs, voices are raised in the corridors. No rest for the wicked.

  Camille has to sort out this report, do a little damage limitation on the impending disaster. All he needs is to buy himself some time, even just a day or two, because if his strategy pays off, it won’t be long before he tracks down Hafner.

  This is the purpose of his report: to buy himself two days’ grace.

  As soon as Hafner has been caught and taken into custody, everything will become clear, the haze of secrecy swirling around the case will dissipate, Camille will explain himself, the disciplinary letter will arrive from his superiors, he could be suspended, have his prospects of promotion permanently quashed, he may even have to request – or accept – a change of post, it does not bother him: with Hafner under lock and key, Anne will be safe. That is all he cares about . . .

  *

  As he sits down to compose this difficult and delicate report (Camille is not one for reports at the best of times), he thinks of the piece of paper he tore from his sketchpad earlier and tossed away. He fishes it out of the wastepaper basket. The pencil portrait of Vincent Hafner, a sketch of Anne in her hospital bed. He lays the crumpled page on his desk and smoothes it out, with his free hand he calls Guérin and leaves a message, the third today. If Guérin does not get in touch soon, it means he does not want to talk to Camille. Contrôleur Général Le Guen on the other hand has been trying to get through to Camille for hours. Four messages in a row: “What the fuck are you playing at, Camille? Call me back right now.” He is frantic. Understandably so. Hardly has Camille written the first line of his report than his mobile starts to vibrate again. Le Guen. This time, Camille picks up, closes his eyes and prepares himself for the histrionics.

  But Le Guen’s voice is calm and measured.

  “Do you think maybe we should have a chat, Camille?”

  Camille could say yes, he could say no. Le Guen is a friend, the one friend who has come through every disaster with him, the one friend capable of changing the course on which he is embarked. But Camille says nothing.

  This is one of those decisive moments which may or may not save his life, and yet he says nothing.

  Not because he has suddenly become masochistic or suicidal. On the contrary, he feels completely lucid. On a blank corner of the sheet of paper, he sketches Anne’s profile in three quick strokes. It is something he used to do with Irène in his idle moments, the way another man might bite his nails.

  Adopting his most considerate, his most persuasive tone, Le Guen tries to reason with him.

  “You’ve really stirred up a shitstorm this afternoon, I’ve got people phoning to ask me if we’re tracking international terrorists. This is a complete fuck-up. I’ve got informants screaming that they’ve been stabbed in the back. You’ve fucked over your fellow officers who have to work with these communities day in, day out. In the space of three hours, you’ve set their work back by a year, and the fact that your man Ravic has been murdered only makes things more complicated. So, right now, I want you to tell me exactly what you’re up to.”

  Still Camille says nothing, he looks down at his drawing. It could have been some other woman, he thinks, but it is Anne. Anne who stepped into his life just as she stepped into the Monier. Why her and not some other woman? Who knows? As he retraces the line of her mouth on the drawing, he can almost feel her soft lips; he accentuates the hollow just below her jawline that he finds so poignant.

  “Camille, are you listening?”

  “I’m listening, Jean.”

  “I’m not sure I can bail you out of this one, you do know that? I’m having a hell of a job trying to placate the magistrate. He’s a smart guy, so it’s not too wise to treat him like an idiot. Needless to say I had a little visit from the top brass less than an hour ago, but I think we can do some damage limitation.”

  Camille sets his pencil down and bows his head. In trying to perfect Anne’s portrait, he has ruined it. It is always the way, a sketch needs to be spontaneous; as soon as you try to change something, it is ruined.

  Camille is suddenly stuck by a curious notion, an utterly new thought, a question that, surprising as it seems, he has never asked himself: what is to become of me afterwards? What do I want? And as so often in a dialogue of the deaf, where neither party is prepared to listen or to hear, the two men come to the same conclusion.

  “This is personal, isn’t it, Camille?” Le Guen says. “You have a relationship with this woman? A personal relationship?”

  “Of course not, Jean, what makes you think . . .”

  Le Guen lets a painful silence hang over the proceedings. Then he shrugs.

  “If this thing blows up in our faces, there are going to be questions . . .”

  Camille suddenly realises that this is not simply about love, it is about something else. He has chosen a dark and winding path, not knowing where it will lead, but he knows, he senses that he is not being swept along by his blind passion for Anne.

  Something is urging him on, regardless of the cost.

  Essentially, he is doing in his life what he has always done in his investigations: doggedly carrying on to the bitter end, so he can understand why things are as they are.

  “If you don’t come up with something now,” Le Guen interrupts the thought, “if you don’t give me some kind of explanation, Michard will have no choice but to kick this upstairs to the procureur’s office. There’ll be no way to avoid an internal investigation . . .”

  “What . . .? An internal investigation into what?”

  Le Guen shrugs again.

  “O.K. Have it your way.”

  *

  8.15 p.m.

  Camille knocks softly on the door; no answer. He opens it and finds Anne lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He sits down next to her.

  Neither says a word. Camille reaches out to take her hand and Anne meekly lets him, she
is overcome by a crushing sense of resignation, almost a fatalism. But after a few minutes, she says simply:

  “I want to leave . . .”

  Resting her weight on her elbows, she slowly sits up in bed.

  “Well, since they’re not going to operate, you should be able to go home soon,” Camille says. “In a day or two, maybe.”

  “No, Camille.” She is speaking very slowly. “I want to leave right now, this minute.”

  He frowns. Anne shakes her head wildly.

  “Right now.”

  “They don’t just let people walk out in the middle of the night. A doctor needs to give you the once-over, you’ll need to collect your prescriptions, and . . .”

  “No! I need to get out of here, Camille, can’t you understand?”

  Camille gets to his feet, Anne is getting worked up, he needs to think of some way to calm her down. But Anne has already swung her legs over the side of the bed and is struggling to stand.

  “I don’t want to stay here, and no-one can force me to . . .”

  “But no-one is trying to force you to . . .”

  Anne suddenly feels dizzy, she has overestimated her strength. She grabs Camille for support, sits back on the bed and bows her head.

  “I’m sure he’s been here, Camille, he wants to kill me, he’ll stop at nothing, I can feel it, I just know.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Camille says, “you don’t know anything at all!”

  It is futile to browbeat her, because the driving force that motivates Anne is a blind terror impervious to reason or to authority. She starts to tremble again.

  “There’s an officer guarding the door, nothing is going to happen to you . . .”

  “Oh, just stop, Camille! When he’s not disappearing off to the toilet, he’s playing solitaire on his mobile! He doesn’t even notice when I leave the room . . .”

  “I’ll have another officer come and take over. It’s just that . . .”

  “What? It’s just that what?”

  Anne tries to blow her nose, but the pain is too great.

  “You know how it is . . . Everything seems frightening at night, but I promise you . . .”

  “No, Camille, you can’t promise. That’s just it . . .”

  These three simple words are painful to both of them. Anne wants to leave precisely because he cannot promise to keep her safe. It is all his fault. She angrily throws her tissue on the floor. Camille tries to help, but she brushes him off. “Leave me alone, I can manage by myself.”

  “What do you mean, ‘by myself’?”

  “Just leave me alone, Camille, I don’t need you anymore.”

  But as she says this, she lies back on the bed exhausted from the simple effort of standing up. Camille pulls up the sheet.

  “Leave me alone.”

  And so he leaves her alone, sits down again, takes her hand in his, but her hand is lifeless, cold. The way she is sprawled across the bed is like an insult.

  “You can go now . . .” she says.

  She does not look at him. Her face is turned to the window.

  Day 3

  7.15 a.m.

  Camille has barely slept in two days. Warming his hands on a mug of coffee, he stares out the window of the studio at the forest. It was here in Montfort that his mother painted for years, almost until her death. Afterwards the place lay abandoned, left to squatters and thieves. Camille hardly gave it a thought and yet, for some obscure reason, he never sold it.

  Then, some time after Irène’s death, he decided not to keep anything of his mother’s, not a single canvas, a vestige of an old grudge between them: it is because of her smoking that he is only four foot eleven.

  Some of the paintings now hang in foreign museums. Camille had promised himself he would donate all the proceeds of the sale but, of course, he did nothing with the money. Not until some years after Irène’s death, when he finally rejoined the world and decided to rebuild and refurbish the little studio on the edge of the forest of Clamart, which had once been the gatekeeper’s lodge to a country house that has long since vanished. Back then, the place was more isolated than it is now, when the nearest house is only three hundred metres away. The dirt road goes no further, it stops here.

  Camille had the place renovated from top to bottom, replacing every wonky terracotta floor tile, installing a full bathroom and building a mezzanine which became his bedroom. The ground floor is now a huge sitting room with an open-plan kitchen, one entire wall is taken up by a picture window overlooking the edge of the forest.

  The forest terrifies him still, just as it did when he spent long afternoons as a child watching his mother work here. These days it is an adult terror, a wistful feeling of mingled pleasure and pain. The one piece of nostalgia he has allowed himself is the gleaming cast-iron wood-burning stove in the centre of the room which replaced his mother’s that was stolen during the years the studio lay derelict.

  Unless carefully regulated, all the heat from the stove rises so that the mezzanine is a sauna while downstairs his feet are freezing, but he likes this rustic method of heating because it has to be earned, because it requires as much attentiveness as experience. Camille knows how to stoke and regulate it such that it will run all night. In the depths of winter, there is a chill to the mornings, but he considers this initial hardship – refuelling and relighting the stove – as a little ritual.

  He had much of the roof replaced with glass so that the sky is constantly visible and, the moment you look up, the clouds and the rain seem about to tumble on you. When it snows, it is unsettling. This opening onto the sky serves no real purpose. Though it lets in more light, the house had more than enough already. Le Guen, ever the pragmatist, enquired about the skylights on his first visit.

  “What do you want?” Camille said. “I might be knee high to a grasshopper, but I can still reach for the stars.”

  Camille comes as often as he can. He spends days off and weekends here, but he rarely invites guests. Then again, he does not have many people in his life. Louis and Le Guen have visited the studio, as did Armand, but although he made no conscious decision, the studio has become a secret place. Camille spends much of his time here drawing, always from memory. Among the piles of sketches and the hundreds of notepads are portraits of everyone he has ever arrested, of every body whose death he has investigated, of magistrates with whom he has worked and colleagues he barely knows. He has a particular fondness for sketching the witnesses he has questioned, the fleeting shadows who disappear as swiftly as they appeared, troubled bystanders and bewildered onlookers, anguished women, girls overcome by emotion, men distraught by their brush with death, they are all here, there are two, perhaps three thousand sketches, a vast, incomparable gallery of portraits, the daily life of an officer in the brigade criminelle as seen by the artist he might have been. Camille’s searingly honest portraits reveal a rare talent, he often claims his drawings are more intelligent than he is, and there is something to the idea. Even photographs seem less faithful, less true. Once, at the Hôtel Salé, Anne had seemed so beautiful that he told her not to move and, taking out his mobile, took a snapshot so that he could freeze the moment and have her appear on the screen whenever she called him, though in the end he replaced it with a scan of one of his sketches which seemed to him more true, more expressive.

  September has not yet turned cold so when he arrived this evening Camille put only a few logs in the stove to create what he calls a “comfort fire”.

  He should bring his cat to live here, but Doudouche does not like the countryside; for her it is Paris or nothing. Doudouche has appeared in many of his sketches. As have Louis and Jean, even Maleval once upon a time. Last night, just before going to bed, he dug out all his portraits of Armand, he even found the sketch of Armand in his hospital bed on the day he died, with that placid, peaceful expression that makes all dead bodies look more or less alike.

  Outside the cottage, at the far end of what he thinks of as “the yard”, is the for
est. As night draws in, the humidity rises. This morning he found his car slick with dew.

  He has often sketched this forest, has even ventured a watercolour though colour is not his strong suit. He is captivated by emotion, by movement, but he is not a colourist as his mother was.

  A 7.15 a.m. precisely, his mobile vibrates. Still cradling his coffee, he picks it up with his free hand. Louis apologises for the early hour.

  “Don’t worry,” Camille says. “So, tell me.”

  “Madame Forestier, she’s left the hospital . . .”

  There is a brief silence. If someone should ever write a biography of Camille, much of it would be dedicated to his silences. Louis, who knows this all too well, cannot help but wonder again precisely what role the missing woman plays in Camille’s life. Is she the real reason for the curious way he has been behaving? To what extent is his behaviour some sort of exorcism? Whatever the truth, Verhœven’s silence is a measure of his distress.

  “How long since she left?” he asks.

  “We’re not sure, sometime during the night. The nurse did her rounds at ten o’clock and talked to her, she seemed calm, but an hour ago the duty nurse found the room empty. She left most of her clothes in the wardrobe which made it seem as though she had just wandered out of the room for a minute, so it took a while before the staff realised she was actually missing.”

  “What about the guard?”

  “He says he has prostate trouble, so when he has to go, it can take a while.”

  Camille takes a mouthful of coffee.

  “I need you to send someone to her apartment immediately.”

  “I went round myself before I called you,” Louis says. “No-one has seen her . . .”

  Camille stares out at the forest as though expecting help to arrive.

  “Do you know if she has any family?”

  No, Camille says, he does not know. Actually, she has a daughter in the States, he remembers. He gropes for a name. Agathe. He decides not to mention her daughter or the brother.

  “If she’s checked into a hotel, it might take us a while to track her down,” Louis says, “but she might have gone to a friend for help. I’ll talk to her colleagues.”