Camille

by Pierre Lemaitre

  “Go on . . .” he says.

  He moves to the wall, then back to the cast-iron stove, lays a finger on the spot where the bullet ricocheted then scans the back wall and sees the gaping hole. He walks to the staircase and crouches there for some time, one hand resting on the splintered fragments of the first step, glances thoughtfully towards the top of the stairs, then turns back to the spot from which the shot was fired. He stands on the second stair.

  “What happened next?” he says, stepping down.

  He walks into the bathroom; from here, Anne’s voice is faint, barely audible. Camille continues his reconstruction; this may be his house, but just now it is a crime scene. Conjecture, observation, conclusion.

  The window is half open. Anne comes into the room, Hafner is waiting, he pushes his arm through the gap and aims the pistol fitted with a silencer. Camille finds the bullet lodged in the doorframe above his head. He goes back into the living room.

  Anne has fallen silent.

  Camille fetches a broom from under the stairs and quickly sweeps the remains of the coffee table against the wall, dusts off the sofa, then goes to boil some water.

  “Come on . . .” he says at length. “It’s over now . . .”

  Anne huddles next to him on the sofa and they sip something Camille insists is tea – it tastes horrid, but Anne does not complain.

  “I’ll take you somewhere else.”

  Anne shakes her head.

  “Why not?”

  It little matters why, Anne flatly refuses to leave though the folly of her decision is evidenced by the ruined coffee table, the bullet holes in the window, the door, the staircase, by every object in this room.

  “I think th—”

  “No,” Anne cuts him off.

  This settles the matter. Camille decides that if Hafner did not manage to gain access to the house, he is unlikely to try again today. There will be time to think again tomorrow. Over the past three days, whole years have elapsed so tomorrow seems very far away.

  Besides, Camille has finally decided on his next move.

  It has taken him a little time, just as long as a boxer might need to scrape himself up off the canvas and get back into the fight.

  Camille is almost there.

  He needs an hour or two. Maybe a little longer. In the meantime, he will lock up the house, check all the exits and leave Anne here.

  They sit together in silence, their thoughts interrupted only by the vibrations from Camille’s mobile which rings constantly. He does not need to check, he knows who is calling.

  It feels strange to sit here holding this unknown woman he knows so well. He knows he should ask questions, but that can wait until after. First he needs to unravel the thread.

  *

  Camille feels suddenly exhausted. Lulled by the leaden sky, the shadowy forest, this squat, slow house transformed into a blockhouse, cradling this mystery to his chest, he could sleep all day if he allowed himself. Instead, he listens to Anne, her ragged breathing, to the soft gulp as she drains her tea, to the heavy silence that has come between them.

  “Are you going to find him?” Anne whispers after a moment.

  “Oh yes.”

  The answer comes immediately, instinctively; Camille sounds so certain, so convinced, that even Anne is surprised.

  “You will let me know as soon as you find him, won’t you?”

  To Camille, the subtext to Anne’s every question could be a whole novel. He frowns quizzically: why?

  “I just need to feel safe, you can understand that, can’t you?”

  Her voice is no longer a whisper, her hand falls away from her mouth and he can see her gums, her broken teeth.

  “Of course . . .”

  He almost apologises.

  *

  Finally, their separate silences merge. Anne has dozed off. Camille can find no words. If he had a pencil, in a few strokes he could sketch their twin solitudes; they are each coming to the end of a story, they are together yet alone. Curiously, Camille has never felt closer to her, a mysterious solidarity binds him to this woman. Gently, he withdraws his arm, lays Anne’s head against the back of the sofa and gets to his feet.

  Time to go. Time to find out the real story.

  He creeps up the stairs like a hunter tracking prey, he moves soundlessly, being intimately familiar with every stair, every creaking board, and besides, he does not weigh much.

  The roof upstairs slopes steeply, at its lowest point the room is only a metre or so high. Camille lays down on the floor and crawls to the far side of the bed to a trapdoor that swings open to provide access to the narrow crawlspace. The cubbyhole is filthy with dust and cobwebs. Camille reaches inside and gropes around, finds the plastic bag and pulls it towards him. A black bin-liner containing a thick folder. A file he has not opened since . . .

  He cannot help but see that everything about this case has forced him to confront his greatest fears.

  He looks around, finds a pillowcase and carefully slips the file inside. With every little movement, the film of dust creates clouds of ash. Camille gets up and steals back downstairs.

  Some minutes later, he is writing a note to Anne.

  “Get some rest. Call anytime. I’ll be back as soon as I can be.”

  I’ll keep you safe – no, this is something he cannot bring himself to write.

  When he is finished, he makes a tour of the house, checking all the door handles, ensuring everything is locked. Before he leaves, he stands and stares at the sleeping form of Anne on the sofa. It pains him to think of leaving her alone. It is difficult to leave, but impossible to stay.

  Time to go. Carrying the thick folder in the striped pillowcase under one arm, Camille crosses the yard and heads through the forest to where he parked the car.

  He stops and looks back. From here, surrounded by the forest, the silent house looks as though it is built on a plinth like a casket or a still-life painting, a vanitas. He thinks of Anne asleep inside.

  But by the time his car slowly moves away into the forest, Anne’s eyes are wide open.

  *

  11.30 a.m.

  As the car speeds towards Paris, Camille’s mental landscape becomes simplified. He may not know what happened, but he knows the questions to ask.

  The key thing now is to ask the right questions.

  In the course of an armed robbery, a killer assaults a woman who calls herself Anne Forestier. He hunts her down, he is determined to kill her, he tracks her all the way to Camille’s isolated studio.

  What is the link between the robbery and the fact of Anne’s false identity?

  Everything would suggest that the woman was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, having come to collect a watch being engraved for Camille, but though they seem utterly unrelated, the two events are connected. Intimately connected.

  Are there any two things that are not connected?

  Camille has not been able to find out the truth from Anne, he does not even know who she really is. So now he must look elsewhere. At the other end of the thread.

  Three missed calls from Louis who, typically, has not left a voicemail. Instead he sent a text message: “Need help?” Some day, when this is all over, Camille plans to adopt Louis.

  Three voicemails from Le Guen. In fact, the message is the same, only the tone changes. With every call, Jean’s voice is calmer, his message shorter and more circumspect. “Listen, I really need you to call me b—” Message deleted. “Um . . . why haven’t you ca—” Message deleted. In the third message, Le Guen sounds grim. In fact, he is simply sad. “If you don’t help me, I can’t help you.” Message deleted.

  Camille empties his mind of every obstacle and pursues his train of thought. He needs to stay focused.

  Everything has become more complicated.

  He has had to radically rethink the situation after the mayhem at the studio. The damage caused is undeniably dramatic, but though he is not a ballistics expert, Camille cannot help but wonder.
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br />   Anne is behind a picture window twenty metres wide. Outside, there is a skilled, determined, heavily armed killer. It is not impossible that missing Anne was sheer misfortune. But failing to put a bullet in her head when he had his arm thrust through an open window and was less than six metres away is suspicious. It is as though, since the Galerie Monier, he has been cursed. Unless this has all been carefully planned from the start. Such a spectacular run of bad luck is scarcely credible . . .

  In fact, one might think that to avoid killing Anne, given the number of opportunities there have been, would take an exceptional marksman. Camille has not known many people equal to such a task.

  This question inevitably prompts others.

  How did he track Anne down to the studio in Montfort?

  Last night, Camille drove this same route from Paris. Anne, exhausted, fell asleep almost immediately and did not wake until they arrived.

  There is a lot of traffic on the motorway and on the Périphérique even at night, but Camille stopped the car twice and waited for several minutes, watching the traffic, and took a roundabout route on the last leg of the journey, along byroads where the headlights of another would have been visible from a considerable distance.

  He has a chilling sense of déjà vu: by launching a raid on the Serbian community, he led the killers straight to Ravic; now he has led them to Anne in Montfort.

  This is the most plausible hypothesis. It is obviously the one he is supposed to accept. But now that he knows that Anne is not Anne, that everything he assumed about the case until now is in doubt, the most plausible theories become the least likely.

  Camille is certain that he was not followed. Which means that someone came looking for Anne in Montfort because they knew she would be there.

  He needs to come up with a different theory. And this time, the possibilities are limited.

  Each solution is a name, the name of someone close to Camille, someone close enough to know about his mother’s studio. To know that he is in a relationship with the woman who was brutally beaten during the raid on the jeweller’s.

  To know that he was planning to take her there for safety.

  Camille racks his brain, but try as he might he can barely come up with a handful of names. If he excludes Armand, who he watched go up in smoke two days ago, the short list is very short indeed.

  And it does not include Vincent Hafner, a man he has never met in his life.

  The only possible conclusion sends Camille into a tailspin.

  He already knows that Anne is not Anne. Now he is convinced that Hafner is not Hafner.

  It means starting the investigation over.

  It means: back to square one.

  And given everything that Camille has done so far, it may mean: Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go . . .

  *

  There he goes again, the runty little cop, making the trip between Paris and his country estate, like a hamster in a wheel. Like a rat. Always scuttling around. I just hope it pays off. Not for him, obviously, at this point he’s up shit creek, he’s well and truly screwed as he’ll find out very soon. No, I hope it pays off for me.

  I’m not about to give up now.

  The girl has done what she needed to, you might reckon she paid her pound of flesh, I can’t complain. It’s going to be a close-run thing, but right now everything seems to be going like clockwork.

  Now it’s my move. My good friend Ravic and I did a perfect dummy run. If the guy were still alive, he’d testify to that, though with all those missing fingers, he’d have a job swearing on the Bible.

  Thinking back, I went easy on him, in fact I think I was pretty lenient. Putting a bullet in his head was almost an act of kindness. I swear, the Serbs are like the Turks, they’re a thankless bunch. It’s their culture. They have no sense of gratitude. And then they come bitching about how they’ve got problems.

  But it’s time to get down to some serious business. I know that wherever he is – I don’t know if there’s a heaven for Serbian thugs, after all there’s definitely one for terrorists – Ravic will be happy. He’ll have his revenge served post mortem because I have a powerful urge to flay someone alive. I’m going to need a bit of luck. But since I haven’t had to call on her so far, I figure the goddess Fortuna owes me a favour.

  And if Verhœven does his job, things should move pretty fast.

  Right now, I’m heading back to my fortress of solitude to rest up a bit, because when this kicks off, I’m going to have to move fast.

  My reflexes might be a little blunted, but my motivation is intact, and that’s what counts.

  *

  12.00 noon

  In the bathroom mirror, Anne examines her gums, stares at the ugly, gaping hole. Since she was admitted to hospital under a false name, she will not be able to access her medical file – the X-rays, the test results – she will have to start over. Start again from scratch – though the word hardly does justice to her injuries.

  He says he wasn’t trying to kill her because he needs her. But he can say what he likes, she does not believe a word. Dead or alive, Anne would have served her purpose. He beat her so brutally, so savagely . . . He might claim that it had to look authentic, but she knows that he actually enjoyed beating her, that he would have done more damage if he could have.

  In the medicine cabinet, she finds nails scissors and a pair of tweezers. The young Indian doctor assured her that the gash on her cheek was not deep. He suggested removing the stitches after ten days. She wants to do it now. In one of the drawers in Camille’s desk she finds a magnifying glass. Working with makeshift instruments in a dimly lit bathroom is not ideal. But she cannot bear to wait any longer. And this is not simply about her obsession with neatness. This is what she used to say to Camille when they were together, that she was a neat freak. Not this time. Contrary to what he might think when all this is over, she did not tell him many lies. The bare minimum. Because it is difficult to lie to Camille. Or because it is too easy. It amounts to the same thing.

  Anne wipes her eyes with her sleeve. It is hard enough to remove the sutures by herself; with tears in her eyes, it is impossible . . . There are eleven stitches. She holds the magnifying glass in her left hand and the scissors in her right. Close up, the little black threads look like insects. She slides the tip of the scissors under the first knot and immediately she feels a sharp pain as though she has stabbed herself. Under normal circumstances, the procedure would be painless, obviously the wound is not yet healed. Or perhaps it is infected. She has to slide the blade quite far to cut the stitch, she screws up her face and goes for it. The first insect is dead, now all she has to do is pull it out. Her hands are trembling. Still trapped beneath her skin, she has to tug with the tweezers, struggling to keep her hands from shaking. Finally it begins to move, leaving an ugly mark as it emerges. Anne peers at the wound but can see no difference. She is about to start on the next suture, but she feels so tense, so unsteady, that she has to sit down and take a breath . . .

  Coming back to the mirror, she presses on the gash and winces, she snips the second suture, and the third. She pulls them out too quickly. Looking through the magnifying glass, the wound is still red, it has not closed up. The fourth stitch is more troublesome, it feels almost welded to her skin. But Anne is determined. She grits her teeth, digs the tip of the scissors into her flesh, tries to cut the thread and fails, the wound gapes and oozes a little blood. Finally the thread snaps, but great drops as big as tears are now trickling from the cut. She deals with the next few sutures quickly, sliding them out and flicking the corpses into the sink, but for the last few Anne has to work blindly because as she wipes away the blood, more gushes to the surface. She does not stop until all the stitches have been removed. Still the blood flows. Without thinking, she rummages in the medicine cabinet for the bottle of surgical spirit and, having no compress, pours some onto her palm and dabs it on.

  The pain is excruciating . . . Anne howls and pounds her fist on the w
ashbasin, the splints on her fingers come loose making her scream even louder. But this scream is hers and hers alone, no-one has ripped it from her body.

  She dabs more alcohol directly onto the wound, then grips the sink with both hands, she feels as though she might pass out, but she stands firm. When the pain finally subsides, she finds a compress, soaks it in surgical spirit and applies it against her cheek. When finally she looks, the bandage does little to hide the ugly, swollen gash which is still bleeding a little.

  There will be a scar. A straight line slashed across her cheek. On a man, people would call it a “war wound”. She cannot tell how big the scar will be, but she knows it will never go away.

  It is permanent.

  And if she had to dig out the wound with a knife she would have done it. Because this is something that she wants to remember. For ever.

  *

  12.30 p.m.

  The car park at the casualty department is always full. This time, Camille has to flash his warrant card just to get in.

  The receptionist is blooming like a rose. A slightly wilted rose, but she lays the concern on thick.

  “So, I hear she disappeared?”

  She makes a sad pout, as though she understands how difficult this is for Verhœven – what happened, it must have come as a shock, it doesn’t say much for the police, does it? Camille walks on, desperate to be rid of her, but this is not as easy as he might have expected.

  “What about that admission form?”

  He retraces his steps.

  “I mean, it’s not really my department, but when a patient does a runner and we don’t even have a social security number, there’s ructions upstairs. And the big shots are quick to pass the buck, they don’t care who’s responsible, they come down on us like a ton of bricks. It’s happened to me often enough, that’s the only reason I’m asking.”

  Camille nods – I get the picture – as though he sympathises while the receptionist fields a series of telephone calls. Obviously, since Anne was admitted under a false name, she could not have produced a social security number. This is why he found no papers in her apartment. She has no papers, or none under that name.