One day, perhaps, she would get to the knot at the heart of Daveney’s problems; in the meantime, though, there were far more pressing questions to answer.
Chapter 9
‘I suppose it’s time. The great healer. I thought at first I’d never get over it – and of course I never will. Not in the sense of it going away or not being unbearable to think about. But I find myself thinking more about other things. The first time it happened – or the first time I noticed – I felt guilty. As if I had no right to allow normality back into my life. Or as if I was somehow betraying Enzo’s memory. But then I thought that’s what the healing process is all about. And I said to myself there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m allowed to feel better when I can.’
They were finishing dinner in Charlotte’s tidy, brightly lit flat in the rue Chomel. ‘Of course you are. I just wish I could do a bit more to make the healing quicker.’
‘You’ve done a lot. You’ve taken an interest. It’s enormous.’
Magali sighed. ‘It’s not enough. Darlier takes an interest too.’
‘You mean he’s not getting anywhere?’
‘I don’t know. Not very fast, anyway. That’s what you said when you hired me.’
‘Yes. I was impatient. Vengeful, in fact.’ Charlotte spread her hands, searching for the right words. ‘It’s always that old argument, you know, you say you’re against the death penalty but imagine if it was your own child. But the argument doesn’t work because it’s impossible to imagine till it happens, and then… Why did I ask you to find him? It isn’t just the satisfaction of knowing. It’s because I wanted to tear him limb from limb.’
‘And now? You’ve got over that?’
‘I don’t know. If I had him in front of me now, I honestly don’t know. Occasionally I still get the fantasy. I try to suppress it but I can’t and it... It’s frightening. I’d like to think I have it in me to forgive. But I don’t think that’s true. Not yet. Maybe not ever.’
‘And if it was her?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Darlier’s switched his sights to Brigitte Bussert.’
‘Ah.’ She nodded gravely. ‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘I think it’s quite recent. They were checking all of Enzo’s acquaintances, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on, plus everyone he was at school with. Getting on for 800 names. But they’ve drawn a blank, so it’s back to square one. Except this time, Brigitte rather than Loïc.’
‘Is she being charged?’
‘I don’t see how they can.’
‘Why not?’
‘She was with a friend for a start, Alice Perrin, which Perrin corroborates, from 7 p.m. onwards, which was when Gilles Mattell left Enzo’s house. Brigitte didn’t leave till after midnight, when she says she drove straight home. But Darlier thinks she could have called on Enzo first. Would he be cooking an omelette at that time? It’s not impossible. So let’s suppose he lets her in and they argue and she grabs an iron pipe from outside and goes back in. She has to keep the pipe hidden behind her back, otherwise Enzo would have managed at least to raise an arm to defend himself, but he didn’t. She’s left-handed, so she was facing him when she hit him, but he fell forward, towards the kitchen table. Strange, but again, not impossible. But it means she’d have moved all the way round him and into the kitchen herself without him noticing she had something behind her back. Possible, too if, for example, he was at the fridge getting the bottle of wine. Then he poured her a glass and put the bottle back and stood up to face her, at which point she hit him. And all this time she’s been standing with a weapon she’s just picked up on an impulse in order to kill him? Why didn’t she do it from behind when he was at the fridge?’ Magali stopped, suddenly seeing the fright in Charlotte’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be saying all this, it just… I suppose I get carried away.’
‘No, it’s just…’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘You’re only doing your job.’
Magali murmured as she reached out to touch her, ‘It’s not my job to be insensitive.’
There was a long silence. The Magali got up and fetched some pages from Darlier’s file. ‘This is the last email Brigitte sent him. Some of it’s quite intimate – well, very – but I thought you might like to read it.’
Charlotte made no comment as she read. When she finished, she was smiling sadly and tears welled in her eyes. ‘It’s beautiful. He was all of that, yes, I’m sure.’
‘She sent it on Monday morning, not long before he was found.’
Charlotte frowned as she grasped the implication. ‘Could she be that cynical, to write something so heartfelt when she’d killed him?’
‘She’d have to be very cynical indeed. And sly and manipulative and… There were several others over the weekend, shorter and more impassioned, and then this one when she realised he wasn’t going to change his mind. A sort of homage to him and their time together. Maybe I’m just naïve but I can’t square this with the idea of her killing him.’
But perhaps all it took was the frenzy of a moment. Blinded by rage she could have been beside herself, somebody different, consumed by the need to punish the man who refused to give her what she wanted. Yes, thought Magali, such a state can exist. All you need do to see it is snatch away a child’s favourite toy and crush it to pieces in front of him.
‘Maybe Darlier’s looking at it through the wrong eyes.’ Charlotte sighed and rose to clear the table. ‘A man’s.’
‘I may be completely wrong, though.’ Magali got up to help. ‘Sometimes I think it’s pretentious of me to doubt what Darlier thinks.’
‘You know, last time we met, I said I was sorry for dragging you into this? But you’re doing a wonderful job. And if you’re wrong and he’s right, the case will at least have been solved. And that’s important to me. Perhaps, if it was Brigitte… I don’t know, she was so in love with him, perhaps I could move some way towards forgiveness. And if it wasn’t, well, justice has to be done either way. So you mustn’t have any doubts about what you’re doing.’
Magali hesitated. But she owed it to Charlotte to tell her what sort of person she’d hired. ‘I was in Royan this morning.’
‘Really? What for?’
‘Something pretty loony, to be honest.’ She told Charlotte of her meeting with Balland, minus the gruesome bits, then of her appointment with Philippe Roudy in Mulhouse. ‘You know, I hardly gave murder a second thought before. Now it’s becoming an obsession.’
‘Oh, dear. All because I rang your bell that day.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s just the way I am. I get fixated on things. Xavier says I’m actually unbalanced. Semi-autistic or obsessive-compulsive or grade two bipolar – take your pick. He keeps on changing the label. But he’s right, at times I lose all sense of perspective. So you say I’m doing a good job but he’d hoot with laughter if he knew what I’m up to.’
‘Well, it sounds to me like his own sense of perspective’s pretty shaky.’ She turned to face Magali. ‘How are you off for money, by the way? All that travelling around, you could probably do with some more.’
‘Oh no, it’s nothing to do with Enzo. It’s way beyond my remit. I’m paying for this myself.’
‘Don’t be silly. I got you into it in the first place. And there’s plenty more where that came from, I’m looking for ways to get through it.’ She laughed at Magali’s expression. ‘Pierre – Enzo’s father – died a couple of years ago so Enzo inherited quite a tidy sum. Now it’s come back to me, minus the tax, of course, but I don’t think of it as rightfully mine, it’s money I don’t feel comfortable with. Do you understand?’
Magali nodded. ‘All right. Thank you. We’ll say you’re funding my training. And hope the investment pays off.’
They moved to the sitting room.
‘Darlier’s fine in his way but I can’t speak to him like I do to you. Officialdom, maybe. His uniform or something. It’s probably my fault. It’s just the way I think about the police even when they’re trying to help.’
> ‘I find him a little sad,’ said Magali. ‘I don’t know if it’s this case or his divorce or something from further back, but he’s not at all happy with what he’s doing.’
Charlotte nodded and was silent. Then she pointed to a box on the floor in the corner of the room. ‘There are some of his belongings. What the police removed from the dining room for analysis. If you want to look…’
Magali glanced at her uncertainly. Did Charlotte expect her to perform a magic trick, pull out a vital clue from the box that all the forensic experts hadn’t seen? But then Charlotte said, ‘I have camomile tea in the evening. Would you like some?’
‘Gladly.’
‘For a while it was Valium. I managed to kick it.’
Left on her own, Magali stared for a while at the box before cautiously opening it. She laid out all the objects on the table. They’d all been put in the box together but on the night of the murder they were separate, each in its own spot either by chance or design. From her memory of the photographs in the file Vincent had given her, she arranged them into two groups: a Murakami novel, a copy of Le Monde Diplomatique, two table mats and a nutcracker had all been on the kitchen table. The other group, from the dresser, consisted of a pair of gloves, a calendar, three pens, a screwdriver, a torch, two piano scores by Eric Satie, and a photograph of Enzo and Charlotte, taken perhaps a dozen years ago.
She studied their positions but saw nothing to link them to the events of that evening. She took photographs of each item, more out of habit than hope. The forensic team had inspected them all for hairs, fingerprints, fibres, traces of blood, but none had yielded the slightest information.
Her eyes were drawn to the picture of mother and son. Charlotte was standing behind him, bending forward, her arms around him, both of them laughing, happy, on a beach on a windy day.
‘That was near my parents’ house in Brittany.’ Charlotte put the cups on the table. ‘We spent quite a few holidays there when he was younger.’
‘Are you Breton?’
‘No, my parents moved there. I grew up in Orléans.’
Magali put the picture back in the box. A permanent fixture on the dresser, it wasn’t a clue to anything except the joy of a mother’s love. If there was a clue, it had to be something linked to the conversation between Enzo and his killer. But any of those items could have been put there for a perfectly valid reason that was independent of anything said that night.
Despite the objects’ silence, though, Magali had the eerie sensation, just as she had in the house itself, of being close to the killer. All that was missing was the sound: oil in the frying pan, wine being poured, voices. Music, too – what had Enzo been listening to that evening?
Charlotte arranged her son’s affairs in the box in precisely the same way as before. ‘I’ll get rid of them eventually. No point hanging on to a couple of mats or an old newspaper. I just can’t do it for the moment.’
‘And the house?’
‘Will be sold. I’ve put it on the market. I’m going down next week to sort out what’s left. It’s a big step but at least it’ll be done.’ She got up to put on a CD. ‘Liszt. One of his favourites.’
‘Satie as well, I imagine?’
‘Oh, yes, he loved Satie. Would you rather listen to that?’
‘No, Liszt is lovely.’
Charlotte came and sat next to her. ‘Luc’s a music lover too, I discovered.’
‘Yes, he used to play the violin. It’s a shame he didn’t keep it up.’
They drank the tea and listened to the music without speaking. After a while, Charlotte put her cup on the table and shifted on the settee in order to lie down, her head resting on Magali’s lap. Before closing her eyes, she looked up at Magali and smiled. Magali’s astonishment quickly turned to pleasure – that Charlotte could so naturally establish comfort and complicity. The head in her lap, and the hair she now began to stroke gently, belonged at once to a grown woman and a small, defenceless girl.
She wondered what Charlotte was thinking. She guessed that what Charlotte was trying to do was empty her mind of all thought.
Chapter 10
Based on their phone conversation, Philippe Roudy had formed the impression that Magali was a private detective who’d read his articles, been convinced, and now was proposing to help him campaign for Nassim Benamrouche’s release. Magali couldn’t recall precisely the words she’d used, but since he’d agreed to meet her so promptly, it was indeed quite possible that she’d allowed him to infer that – evasiveness has its uses. Sitting opposite him now, though, in a café close to the newspaper premises, she felt she ought to set the record straight. ‘I’m not intending to get involved in the Roncet case. And I’m not really a private detective either, not yet. I will be next June if I get my qualification.’
Roudy managed to rein himself in – not yet annoyed, but a notch above disconcerted. ‘So what brings you here?’
‘I’m helping a friend whose son was murdered last March in a village in the Cévennes. I’m not suggesting we’re looking at the same person, but when I read about the Roncet case, it struck me that there were some similarities. I was hoping you might help me narrow the profile down.’
‘Profile? I’m sorry, I don’t follow.’
‘Enzo – my friend’s son – let whoever killed him into the house quite willingly. Yet that person came – or so I believe – with the intention of killing him. From what I gather, the circumstances were similar with Roncet. No fight and nothing was stolen. I could add that in both cases the victims died from two or three blows to the head or neck, no more, one from a heavy blunt instrument, the other from a knife. And forensic evidence appears to be slim or non-existent.’
Roudy stared at her, blinking. ‘What makes you think I’m looking for anyone?’
It was Magali’s turn to be taken aback. ‘Well, if Benamrouche is innocent, the investigation has to start over from scratch. Isn’t that what you’re doing? You are certain he’s innocent, right?’
‘Since publishing those pieces, I’ve had death threats myself, I get hate mail by the dozen, I’ve been insulted and spat on.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘Yes, I’m certain.’
‘Why such reactions? You mean no one believes you?’
‘My editor supports me. So far.’ He leant forward, tapping his finger on the table. ‘Do you know how many people vote National Front around here? In Wallenheim, where Roncet lived, it’s more than forty per cent. I’m either an Islamic terrorist or else a queer that likes nothing better than being buggered by Arabs. Roncet himself was racist as hell, he made no secret of it. So what’s he doing letting an Arab into his home?’
‘What was the suggestion at the trial?’
‘The prosecution claim was that Benamrouche tricked his way in. Made up a story about running out of petrol. Several who knew Roncet said that was plausible – for all his grumpiness, he was a trusting sort of person. But Benamrouche has a North African accent that Roncet would certainly have detected. He might have been trusting, but he wouldn’t have trusted an Arab. So what happened? He let him in to help him and then insulted him? Maybe. And Benamrouche took out a knife and stabbed him. But even at his age Roncet was a powerful man and Benamrouche isn’t. I can’t believe it could have happened that way without there being a fight.’
‘My question, then,’ said Magali, ‘is where can it go from here? Without any evidence that incriminates someone else, it’s not going to be easy to get Benamrouche released.’
‘There’s not enough evidence against him, that’s the point.’ Roudy spoke fiercely. ‘Of course it would help to have another suspect, but there isn’t one. What I’m criticising is the way the police set about it right from the start. An Arab was there so he must have done it. Simple as that. So then they pile on the pressure until he confesses.’ He took a swig of beer and leant back, muttering, ‘Believe me, if I had the slightest idea who might have done it, I’d have shouted it out long ago.’
‘Of course.’ Maga
li nodded. She’d imagined Roudy as a bearded rebel who’d be delighted to help her. But with his suit and tie and smooth black hair, he looked more like a bank manager. ‘What I’m looking for really,’ she said, ‘is anything you have which might indicate what sort of person to be looking for. Given the similarities, there must be something the killers have in common. Maybe their motives were totally different but they set about it the same way.’
‘What are you suggesting? They like the same clothes? The same music?’
Magali sighed. ‘I’m saying they think the same way. They plan ahead and they’re very careful. Maybe, yes, they carry that carefulness into the way they dress. I’d say they’re highly organised. Maybe they have some sort of compulsive routine. Or they’re superstitious or they play chess… I don’t know, something that sheds a light on their personality.’
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