“You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”
“That would surprise me.”
“You’ve already lost.”
“You’re very presumptuous.”
“If we find Ingrid’s body, I promise you that we’ll never quit. I won’t leave you any peace.”
“The time for peace will come soon. I can’t lose.”
“Now it’s your turn to be presumptuous.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because that depends on the goal of the game. And I’m the one who determines the goal and the rules. I alone. I can’t lose, but you can win all the same.”
The kidnapper paused, then said one last thing before he hung up. Something that made a shiver run down Sebag’s back. And certainly down the backs of all the policemen who were listening to their conversation. Castello was the first to recover.
“He said the parking lot at Força Real. We’re all going. We’ll meet up there.”
Sebag rushed out of the hotel and jumped into his car. Starting the engine, he put the transmission in first gear but stalled as he tried to pull away. Instead of restarting, he got out of the car.
He crossed the street and went over to the beach. He was beginning to understand something.
The telephone at the hotel had rung as soon as Sebag crossed the threshold. However, no precise time had been set for the rendezvous. It couldn’t have been accidental. The kidnapper was there. Somewhere. Very nearby.
When Sebag arrived, the kidnapper had seen him get out of the car and go into the hotel. It was only then that he’d dialed the hotel’s number.
“Goddamn it,” Sebag swore out loud, causing two ladies sitting on a bench in the shade of a palm tree to jump. He was there and I didn’t see him!
He spoke to the two women.
“Did you see a man make a telephone call here a few minutes ago—about forty, tall, slender, with light brown hair?”
The women looked at each other. They seemed to be hesitating as to whether they should answer this strange and rude individual.
“No. We’re sorry. We were talking. We paid no attention.”
He looked out over the beach one last time. He couldn’t help thinking that the kidnapper was still there and was smiling as he observed him. He got back into his car and set out for Força Real. On the way, Castello informed him that he had just learned that the cell phone the kidnapper had used belonged to Lopez.
Just as he was leaving Millas and was starting up the switchbacks that led to the hermitage, his telephone rang. It was Léo.
“Hello, son. How’s it going?”
“Fine. How about you?”
“Work. Routine.”
“You’re not too bored, being all alone?”
So much concern was concealing something. Gilles was aware of that, but the call still pleased him.
“No, not at all. I’ve begun to rather like it. Freedom, you know, no limits. And you, are you still having as much fun?”
“More and more. Yesterday, we had an all-day outing. On the bike from eleven in the morning until seven in the evening.”
A car from the gendarmerie passed him at high speed. Its tires squealed on the turn. To keep the conversation from bogging down, Gilles helped out his son.
“Did you have something you wanted to ask me?”
“No, no. I was calling just to see how you were doing . . . But, well, since you mention it, I’ve got a great buddy here, he’s from Toulon. His parents have a yacht on the Côte d’Azur. They’ve offered to take me along for a couple of days this summer . . . if you’re willing to let me go.”
Sebag tried to avoid making a decision.
“We’ll have to ask your mother.”
“I already did. I called her on the phone.”
The first rule for obtaining parental authorization is to start with the more flexible parent. Léo was clever, and had perfected his technique.
“And your mother said she had no objection if I agreed . . . ”
“Right, papa. You know what? You should have been a cop.”
Gilles didn’t like his son to use that word. He wasn’t so clever after all, this son of his; he’d violated the second rule: don’t rub your father the wrong way, especially if he was reluctant from the start.
“So?” Léo timidly asked, concerned about his father’s silence, which he feared was hostile.
“I promise you to think about it, but for the moment I’ve got work to do. Can you call me again tomorrow?”
“Okay, papa. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Bye, Léo. Love you.”
Gilles wasn’t unhappy with himself. Not only had he not yielded immediately, but he had forced his son to call him the next day.
He parked his car in the lot below the hermitage. What were they going to find this time? On the way from Canet, he’d avoided asking himself that question, but when he saw the grim faces of his colleagues, he understood that they were fearing the worst as well. That was also why he’d taken the call from Léo. A breath of life before the horror.
As it had been the preceding week, the parking lot was full of cars, the dark blue of the gendarmerie’s vehicles harmonizing with the white of those belonging to the national police. The collaboration between the two branches could perhaps be seen in this color compatibility, Sebag said to himself, while noting that the red of a big station wagon disturbed the pattern. As they had the preceding week, the gendarmes fanned out over the area, kicking up tufts of dry grass looking for earth that had recently been dug up. Sebag felt like he was watching a flashback. He recalled a movie he’d seen a few years earlier. Groundhog Day, that was the title of this film, in which the hero was forced to relive the same events, over and over. But it was certainly not Lopez’s corpse wrapped in a plastic bag that they were going to find today.
Castello came up to him.
“For the moment, we haven’t seen anything. The other day, he said ‘in the shade of the hermitage.’ Am I wrong, or has he failed to give us any clue this time?”
Sebag tried to recall the kidnapper’s last sentence, the words that had made a shiver run down his back.
“He said: ‘Last stage, for today,’ didn’t he?
“Precisely.”
“And you didn’t notice anything in the rest of the conversation, either?”
“No. I listened to it again several times on the way here with Lefèvre, and we didn’t notice anything in particular.”
“Can we listen to it in your car?” Sebag asked.
“Of course. Come on.”
Castello led him to his car. Lefèvre was leaning against it. The superintendent opened the driver’s side door. He picked up the radio microphone and asked that the tape be replayed for him.
“Put the headset on—you’ll hear better.”
Sebag sat down. It was warm inside the car. He put on the headset and listened attentively to the recording.
“Well?” Lefèvre asked when he got out of the car.
“I didn’t notice anything in particular. I have to say that I didn’t let him run the conversation.”
“I thought you did pretty well,” the young Parisian cop said. “You brought him down a peg or two.”
Castello seemed delighted by this thaw in the two men’s relations. Sebag, for his part, appeared not to have heard the compliment.
“It’s odd that he didn’t give us a clue. I thought he liked to play.”
“Maybe there’s a clue that we’re not seeing,” Lefèvre suggested.
“If there is, it’s well hidden,” Castello groaned.
“Or it’s so obvious that we don’t see it,” Lefèvre said.
Sebag thought out loud.
“If there is a clue, it can only be in the last sentence. However, a
ll he said was: ‘The parking lot at Força Real, last stage, for today.’”
He repeated the sentence slowly, as if to himself.
“‘For today . . . ’ I think that’s rather reassuring: the game isn’t over.”
The gendarmes were still searching the area around the hermitage. One of them suddenly looked up and called to one of his colleagues. The other man quickly came up to him. He took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and threw it to him. Sebag went back to his thoughts.
“The parking lot at Força Real . . . ”
His eyes swept over the parking lot and stopped at the red splotch made by the station wagon. Then he recalled the testimony Molina had taken right there a few days earlier. An ornithologist had told him he’d seen a big red station wagon several times.
“I thought that car belonged to tourists or hikers,” Castello said. He’d seen what Sebag was looking at.
“That’s what I thought, too,” said Lefèvre.
“He’s clever,” the inspector commented. “He knew that we’d be obsessed by the idea of finding a body buried up here, and that it would take us a while to see what should have jumped out at us immediately.”
As they talked, the three men had approached the car. It was a big Volvo station wagon.
Castello called an officer over. He asked him to send the car’s license number to headquarters.
“I want an answer within one minute,” he ordered.
Lefèvre was walking around the car. He stopped in front of the driver’s window.
“It looks like it was started without a key,” he said excitedly, pointing to wires that were hanging down under the steering wheel.
He continued to inspect the car. He pressed his head against the back window. Sebag saw him shudder.
“There’s a tarp hiding something . . . ”
Castello approached, but the inspector preferred to keep his distance. He’d thought he saw a vague form under the covering and nausea was already roiling his stomach. He saw again in his mind’s eye the photos of Ingrid Raven. The young woman’s perfect body. Her shining eyes and her smile full of life.
The officer soon came back.
“The vehicle belongs to a certain Didier Coll, who lives in La Fusterie Street in Perpignan. It was reported stolen last Thursday.”
Castello gave the signal. The police officers began to examine the vehicle’s body. They noted a few dents, but they all seemed to have been made long ago. They took fingerprints off the door handles, and then took samples of earth from the wheels and the underside of the car.
Then it was time to open the trunk.
Wearing gloves, Jean Pagès pushed on the latch. It offered no resistance and the trunk slowly opened. The head of the crime lab waited for his co-worker to take a few photographs and then caught hold of the tarp. He drew a deep breath and slowly pulled. Instinctively, the policemen crowded around the trunk of the car. Castello had to remind his men to observe a minimum of decency.
The tarp slipped off. They all held their breaths.
The trunk contained nothing but a few women’s clothes.
And a large cushion to deceive them.
CHAPTER 31
Sebag slept very badly.
He’d gotten home late. Tired and frazzled by the day’s tension. It had been a warm night; at midnight it was still 80 degrees outside, without a breath of wind.
The dark aroused pain and doubts. Up to that point, he’d succeeded in not thinking about what the two Margots had told him. But it had remained hidden in his mind like arthritis in an old body.
Claire had a lover.
His reaction had surprised the two Margots. He hadn’t wanted to know more. Why? He was still asking himself the same question.
He’d taken this revelation as if it had been an inevitable fact: it had to happen sooner or later. When he’d realized one day that Claire could dream about other men, he’d already felt betrayed. Don’t we give ourselves away as much in our dreams as in our acts?
Where did adultery begin? It wasn’t a new debate. There were several possible answers to the question. He had to find his own.
He woke up repeatedly, sweating heavily. Since summer had really set in, the walls of the house no longer remained cool. Toward three in the morning, he finally got up and did a couple of laps in the pool. He swam under the water to avoid making noise. Then he went back to bed, all wet.
Dawn woke him out of his agitated dreams long before six o’clock.
Even though he’d had a bad night, he went for a run anyway. But he limited himself to jogging for half an hour. Keep exercising without increasing fatigue.
To drive his professional and conjugal preoccupations out of his mind, he tried to think about Léo. What was he going to tell him when he called back to ask again about sailing on the Côte d’Azur with his friend’s parents? He didn’t want to let him leave in August, but he had no valid reason to refuse. He couldn’t say to his son: “No, you can’t go to your pal’s home because your father wants to keep you close to him. Keep you for himself.”
He took advantage of the time on his hands to do a little housework. He ran the vacuum cleaner around the kitchen and living room and mopped the floor. The dust on the furniture could wait a little while longer. Before leaving, he started a load of laundry that he would take out when he got home that evening. If he wanted to wear decent-looking shirts, he would also have to do some ironing. A real chore with heat like this.
He got to headquarters long before Molina. From home, he’d called the Revels, the artist couple in Collioure, to ask them to stop by and identify the clothing found in the car. They’d promised to come early.
Sebag brought the clothes to his office. They had been put separately into transparent plastic bags. There was a pair of sky-blue pirate pants and a pink tunic with half-length sleeves whose opening in front could be adjusted by a series of small straps. There was also a pair of sandals with pink and green laces that crossed under a white flower. In the absence of a label, it was not clear where the shoes came from, but the clothes had been bought in France. The tunic and the pants had been washed before being left in the car, and no fingerprints could be taken from them. Nothing indicated that they belonged to Ingrid Raven.
Molina suddenly appeared behind Sebag.
“He sure fooled us, the bastard! I really thought the girl’s body was in that trunk.”
“Everybody thought that,” Sebag said. “He’d foreseen our reactions and knew how to play on our nerves.”
“It’s terrible to say it, but I was almost disappointed not to find a corpse in the car.”
Sebag did not comment, but at the time he’d shared this disagreeable feeling of frustration. Relief had come only later in the evening. It was followed by a furious desire to get this over with, to arrest the guy before it was too late.
Someone knocked twice on the door.
“Come in!” Molina shouted.
An officer in uniform appeared on the threshold.
“Mr. and Mrs. Revel are here. They have an appointment, I think.”
Molina had the couple come in. Sebag put the clothes on his desk. Before asking the question, he already knew the answer. He’d seen Martine Revel’s glance and the trembling of her lips that followed it.
“Do you recognize these clothes?”
“Has something happened to Ingrid?” she asked instead of replying.
“So far as we know, she is still alive.”
“We’ve heard about the cab driver,” Gérard Revel said. “That is . . . We read in the newspaper about his murder and we made the connection with Ingrid. Are you sure she’s alive?”
“In this case, we’re not sure about anything,” Molina admitted. “But right now there’s no reason to think that her kidnapper has killed her.”
The Revels didn’t look convince
d. Sebag pointed to the clothes on his desk.
“I need an official response, Mrs. Revel. Did these clothes belong to Ingrid?”
“Yes. She was wearing them the day I met her at the museum in Céret. The tunic suited her well. It showed off the whiteness of her skin.”
“Are you certain about that?”
“As certain as one can be,” she said, annoyed. “These are not the only clothes of this kind, I suppose. Let’s say that she had clothes just like these.”
Sebag quickly typed out the report and had them sign it.
“Is that all?” the Revels said as they reluctantly rose to their feet.
“That’s all, yes.”
“Are you going to find her?” the woman asked.
“I’m sure we will,” Sebag said as firmly as possible.
The Revels were satisfied by that answer and left the office, not without adding that the police could contact them at any time, day or night, if they needed any further information.
“They’re afraid they’re partly responsible,” Sebag noted after their departure. “That’s normal. They feel like they handed her over to the wolves.”
Molina nodded pensively.
“You mean that if Martine hadn’t been so stuck up and refused the threesome, none of this would have happened?”
“Who can say? Maybe she would have had her throat cut a few days later in the streets of Amsterdam as she came out of a movie theater.”
“Yeah. I’m going down to drink some coffee. Do you want something?”
Sebag declined the offer and called Pagès’s office to find out if he’d finished examining the red station wagon. The telephone rang but no one answered.
For the moment, the previous day’s treasure hunt had not advanced the investigation. The kidnapper had led them to a car. There must be a clue. The clothes? For Sebag, they were more in the nature of a proof. In case the police had difficulty making the connection between this abandoned vehicle and the kidnapping of Ingrid. But there must be something else.
On the telephone the day before, Sebag had laid his cards on the table, and the situation was now clear for everyone: the smokescreens had been dissipated. Sebag and the kidnapper were now face to face. The game was under way. The life of a young woman was at stake.
Summertime All the Cats Are Bored Page 29
