Summertime All the Cats Are Bored

by Philippe Georget

  Didier Coll was smiling. He was extremely pale and seemed to be asleep. A sticky puddle covered the floor from the chair to the fireplace. Sebag approached the body. The legs were resting on a low table, where an empty glass held up a handwritten sheet of paper. Sebag bent down. The glass had contained alcohol. As for the message, it was a short poem in verse. A few stanzas and a refrain. Castello’s figure appeared in the doorway.

  “Is he dead?”

  Sebag put his head on Coll’s chest. To his great surprise, he heard a distant heartbeat.

  “It looks like he isn’t,” he said, standing up.

  “Then let’s get the emergency team working on him.”

  Castello went away. Before launching the operation, he’d alerted the emergency medical service. A young woman doctor entered the house. Two nurses were following her, a stretcher under their arms. All the inspectors waited outside. Without saying anything. The crackling of the walkie-talkies reported the exploration of the house.

  “Nothing found upstairs. It’s an attic. There are only cardboard boxes containing old clothes, papers, and photo albums.”

  “There’s an unmade bed in one of the two bedrooms on the ground floor. A few clothes in a closet and books on a kind of secretary. That’s all.”

  “The kitchen has been used recently. There’s an empty bottle of vodka in the sink and fresh food in the fridge.”

  Jean Pagès and his assistant made their way through the inspectors. Castello put his walkie-talkie to his mouth to speak with the policemen inside the house.

  “If you don’t find anyone, come back out again. And be careful especially on the ground floor, there’s blood everywhere.”

  Pagès granted him a smile in place of thanks. Before going in, he had to let the stretcher pass. He questioned the young doctor. She rolled her eyes.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” she said. “He’s in a coma. We’ll rush him to the hospital. I can’t say right now whether he’ll make it.”

  The walkie-talkie cut her off. There was more crackling, and the voice was more excited.

  “I’m in the cellar. It’s empty, but it’s clear that somebody has been held here.”

  Sebag went back inside. When he saw him, Pagès gave him a dirty look.

  “Don’t get upset, I’m not going to touch anything,” Sebag said.

  While he was going down the stone steps that led to the cellar, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around. It was Lefèvre.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a hall led to a door. At the midpoint, a freezer narrowed the passage. Long and wide, it looked like a white tomb. The policemen stopped, hesitating. Lefèvre put his hand on the lid, took a deep breath, and lifted it.

  The freezer was empty.

  Sebag and Lefèvre followed the hall to the door. They found a first room converted into a bathroom. A bare, dim bulb gave a pale light. Across from a large closet there was a shower pan. A policeman in uniform was already there examining the place, his revolver still raised.

  “That’s good, you can take off,” Sebag told him. “There’s no point in too many of us being here.”

  He went into the other room. The odor of wine still filled the atmosphere, but far less than the stale smell of a wild animal.

  “It smells like dirty underpants and sweaty armpits,” Lefèvre coldly summed up.

  Sebag preferred to say nothing. Aside from its brutality, Lefèvre’s remark stated the obvious.

  The room was plunged in semi-darkness. It had a small, high window that let only a slender ray of sun come in. Sebag, feeling his way, found a light switch. He flipped it, but nothing happened. Lefèvre crossed the room with small, cautious steps. He opened the window and with a well-aimed blow of his fist knocked away the pile of planks and cardboard that obstructed the opening. An old mattress, a table, a chair, and a slop pail were the cell’s only furnishings.

  Sebag went over to the mattress. He sniffed it. Examined it without touching it. There were damp spots on the pillow. Tears or sweat. He felt dizzy. A profound fatigue came over him.

  He sat down against the wall. Exhausted. It wasn’t over. The game went on.

  Ingrid must have undergone a terrible ordeal during her three weeks in this horrible prison. She had experienced solitude, darkness, filth. Fear and anxiety. The total absence of hope in this damp dungeon. He recalled bits of a poem by Baudelaire. In it there was something about a damp dungeon. He no longer remembered the beginning, but it went something like:

  “Hope, like a bat, goes beating against the walls with its timid wing and hitting its head on rotten ceilings.”

  The end, on the other hand, he remembered only too well. Opening his lips, he murmured:

  “ . . . Hope, defeated, weeps and atrocious, despotic Fear plants its black flag on my bowed skull.”

  He buried his face in his hands and lost consciousness for a few fractions of a second.

  A hammering sound drew him out of his torpor. He looked up. Lefèvre was tapping the wall with the butt of his gun.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” Sebag asked him.

  “A cavity . . . a hiding place . . . a secret room, I don’t know, some weird thing.”

  Sebag gave up on trying to hide his puzzlement. Lefèvre felt obliged to explain.

  “Do you remember the case of Dutroux, the Belgian pedophile?

  “In its main outlines, yes.”

  “When the gendarmes who were investigating the disappearance of two girls searched Marc Dutroux’s house the first time, they inspected the notorious cellar where they had been imprisoned, but didn’t find anything. The girls were just a few centimeters away from them, in a cavity hidden behind a wall, but gendarmes didn’t see or hear anything. I wouldn’t like something like that to happen to me someday.”

  Sebag leaned against the wall to stand up. He rubbed his hands and brushed off his clothes whitened by the saltpeter that was oozing out of the concrete blocks. Then he took out his lighter and also started tapping the wall. Elsa Moulin, Pagès’s assistant, found them hard at it when she silently entered the room. They jumped. She smiled at them.

  “You rehearsing for a concert?”

  “I wish we were, yes,” Sebag replied, “but this damned wall refuses to produce more than one note.”

  “Jean is getting impatient about you being here. He’d like you to leave the site. This is our job, and he’s pretty touchy about that.”

  Sebag put his hand of Lefèvre’s shoulder.

  “We’ve gone all the way around, haven’t we?”

  “Yeah. Apparently there isn’t anything.”

  The young superintendent turned to Elsa.

  “I’d like you to examine this room first.”

  “No problem. We’ve already finished in the living room. I’ll go talk to Jean; if I propose it, he won’t object.”

  Sebag was glad to get out into the daylight. His fatigue was visible on his face.

  “You should go rest,” Castello advised him. “You can’t do anything more for the moment. In that condition you won’t be of any use to us. We’ll stay here. We’re going to examine every square centimeter of this house and if necessary we’ll dig up the yard.”

  Sebag was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He couldn’t make up his mind to leave. He knew Castello was right. But it wasn’t easy to let go.

  “I also told Molina to go,” the superintendent insisted. “You’ve both done good work. It’s for us to take over now. Go home, take a nice shower, and lie down. I promise to let you know if we find something. Otherwise, we’ll meet at eight A.M. tomorrow at headquarters.”

  As he was talking, the superintendent had started walking down the driveway. Sebag followed him. Molina was waiting in front of the gate.

  “Jacques, take Gilles home and then you keep the car.”

 
His hand on the car door, Sebag was still hesitating. He looked at the house for a long time. Molina came up to him.

  “Nobody is indispensable. We’ve done all we could. It’s the others’ turn now.”

  Sebag turned back toward his colleague.

  “He left a note on a coffee table. I read it but I can’t remember a single word. It’s probably important.”

  “Give yourself a couple of hours’ sleep in your bed, and afterward you’ll be fresher to launch into a new puzzle.”

  On the way, Molina and Sebag didn’t try to make conversation. They were thinking only about Ingrid. The young woman’s smiling face danced before Sebag’s eyes: what had happened to her? Were they now going to have to look for her corpse?”

  At the La Garrigole traffic circle, Sebag advised Molina to take the ford to pass over the Têt River.

  Somehow, Sebag sensed that the young woman was still alive. Coll had planned for the game to go on after his death. That thought produced a feeling of urgency. Did he have the right to go rest while Ingrid was waiting for him somewhere? He reproached himself for giving up too quickly, and then for taking this too much to heart. As Molina had said, no one is indispensable. He no more than anyone else. The investigation could move ahead without him.

  They drove by the Saint-Estève rugby stadium and arrived in front of the water tower. They were no longer very far from his home.

  Molina stopped the car in front of the gate to the house. Sebag opened the car door and then held out his hand to his colleague.

  “By the way, weren’t you supposed to see your sons today?”

  “I was. But my wife agreed to keep them again this weekend. Monday it’ll all be over, won’t it?”

  Sebag nodded.

  “Yes. One way or another.”

  The solitude and silence of the house were a relief to him.

  He took a beer out of the fridge, drank it out of the bottle, and collapsed in an armchair in the living room. Sebag thought he was not doing a good job of handling the shock of staying up all night. He felt old.

  He took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Castello’s number. A dull fear had started twisting his stomach. But the superintendent quickly reassured him. The pond had been rapidly dragged. They’d found only three frogs and a whistling toad.

  He left the empty beer bottle on the coffee table and slipped between the sheets on his bed—they were dirty, he’d have to change them.

  It didn’t take him long to lose the thread of his thoughts. He slept long and deeply, even though his sleep was full of unpleasant dreams. Chained in the hold of a decommissioned ocean liner, Claire was desperately calling to him for help, but he couldn’t move. He’d drunk too much, and his excessively heavy body was incapable of responding.

  He woke up screaming.

  CHAPTER 41

  Intrepid mouse sang, content to wait,

  But cruel cat’s paw set its fate

  For ill-trained dog t’was check and mate.

  Down in damp hell, mouse at bay

  Slept, and had naught to say

  While cat found himself a hairy prey.

  Who does what, who catches who?

  Who’s the cat, who the mouse, who?

  Tired of being cat, greedy mouse was fain

  to play, make his prey first lose, then gain.

  He chooses a day to sit, opens a vein.

  Mouse found it amusing you to use

  You found me, but I didn’t lose.

  Beyond the passage the game renews.

  Who does what, who catches who?

  Who’s the cat, who the mouse, who?

  The die is cast, the cat’s run away

  The mouse remains on a summer day

  For other cats’ survival, she must stay.

  In shade of a mast bobbing o’er the wave

  She waits and waits, a patient slave

  The house of stone will be her grave.

  Who does what, who catches who?

  Who’s the cat, who the mouse, who?

  CHAPTER 42

  Sunday morning, eight o’clock. No one was absent from the roll call. Even Llach was back. Informed of the latest developments, he’d left his union buddies and returned to be with his teammates.

  Sebag had lost count of the meetings they’d had regarding the Ingrid Raven case. All he knew was that there had been too many of them. Far too many. Three weeks of intense work on a single investigation—he’d never seen that since he’d been in Perpignan.

  One thing was sure: this Sunday meeting was one of the last, if not the last. If anyone still had any illusions, Castello dispelled them at the outset:

  “As the hours go by, our chances of finding Ingrid alive are getting slimmer.”

  Jeanne distributed to everyone a posthumous poem by Didier Coll, taking care to make her red miniskirt flutter among the tables. But the lovely muleta waved in front of their eyes did not succeed in distracting the inspectors from their somber thoughts.

  “I’ve just talked to the head of intensive care at the Perpignan hospital: Didier Coll is still in a coma, his condition is considered stable, but the doctors remain pessimistic. In any case, even if he wakes up, we can’t count on getting any information out of him.”

  Ménard was the first to present his report. The preceding day he’d gone to the retirement home to question Didier Coll’s mother. His report was brief: the old woman was completely senile. He hadn’t noticed immediately, and had even been surprised by how coherent some of her remarks were. She spoke well; her words were precise and clear. Except that all the events she was talking about dated from the 1970s. In her world, Didier was a turbulent adolescent loner who spent his leisure time exasperating his father.

  “She thinks her husband is still living with them, for example. She constantly repeats that he’s going to return soon, even though he disappeared in 1988.”

  “Is he dead?” Castello asked.

  “No one knows, in fact. One fine day he went to a professional meeting and was never seen again. At the time, the investigators thought he probably just took off: he had a mistress and had just withdrawn a large sum of cash from his bank account.”

  Cyril Lefèvre came into the room without knocking. After quickly greeting everyone, he sat down on the superintendent’s right and passed him a bundle of papers. Sebag recognized Jean Pagès’s format. Castello thanked Ménard and started to sum up the work done by the police lab on the Colls’ property.

  “Our colleagues are still there, they’re going to deal with the yard now. The examination of the house confirms what we assumed, namely that Ingrid was in fact held in the cellar from the beginning of her imprisonment until yesterday morning.”

  He turned to Lefèvre for further details.

  “Pagès and Moulin examined that cellar as well, and didn’t find any secret hiding place. Moreover, after inspecting the rental car during the afternoon, they conclude that the young woman was moved just before we arrived. She was transported to some place that we assume to be relatively close to the house in Le Soler. Not more than two and a half hours separated the time when Coll abandoned his scooter in front of the retirement home and the time we surrounded the property. Traces of sweat were found in the station wagon’s trunk. Even in the absence of DNA analyses—they will arrive too late in any case—Pagès says he’s convinced that it is in fact Ingrid Raven’s sweat.”

  Castello took the time to look at each member of his audience.

  “And that indicates that the young woman was still alive when she was transported. As you know, a corpse doesn’t sweat.”

  A heavy silence reigned in the room. A little fly was buzzing in the air, indifferent to the thickness of the atmosphere. Castello went on.

  “We have to start out from the principle that at this precise moment, Ingrid is aliv
e. Still a prisoner somewhere, but alive. Unfortunately, as I told you when I began, we may now have only a few hours to find her.”

  “So long as the referee hasn’t blown the whistle, the game’s not over,” Molina said approvingly.

  Castello liked what he said, and not being used to agreeing with Molina, he willingly said so. Sebag had just read and reread Coll’s poem, and thought he’d deciphered as least its general meaning.

  “For me, it’s obvious. Ingrid Raven isn’t dead. Otherwise the game Coll invented wouldn’t be meaningful.”

  He picked up the copy of the poem he had in front of him and waved it at his colleagues.

  “Besides, Coll wrote it in black and white: ‘You found me, but I didn’t lose, beyond the passage, the game renews.’ It’s clear: for the game to continue, Ingrid has to be alive.”

  Eight faces simultaneously bent over the copies of the poem. Castello whisked away the fly that had just landed on his hand, then read out loud the whole stanza Sebag was citing.

  “And ‘beyond the passage,’ what does that mean exactly?” Molina asked.

  “Oh, that’s a way of saying ‘beyond death’ and more precisely ‘beyond his own death,’ Sebag replied. “That kind of image is often found in poems written by adolescents who want to believe that everything will be easy after death.”

  “Really? Do your kids write morbid stuff like that?”

  “No, not my kids.”

  Sebag didn’t have to say more. Lefèvre agreed with his interpretation.

  “That’s how I read that stanza, too.”

  “What if it’s a false lead?” Raynaud interrupted. “Coll showed himself to be particularly sly and he’s been able to throw us off track several times since this case began.”

  “He was also able to put us on the right track,” Sebag said.

  “‘Play, make his prey first lose, then gain,’” Lefèvre recited.

  “Cyril has read Coll’s poem very attentively,” Castello explained, “and at this point I’d like to ask him to give us his interpretation of the text.”