Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  "You seem to have got over the shock quickly enough," Niémans observed.

  "What shock?"

  "You remember? You discovered a…"

  "I'm trying not to think about it."

  "So would you mind talking about it again?"

  "That's why you're here, isn't it?"

  She was not looking at the policeman. Her hands continued to run up and down the length of the board. Her movements were jerky and brutal.

  "In what circumstances did you find the body?"

  "Every weekend I go down the rapids…" She pointed at her upturned raft…"on one of these things. I'd just finished one of my little trips. Near the campus, there's a rock face, a natural dam, which blocks the current and lets you land easily. I was pulling out my raft when I noticed it…"

  "In the rocks?"

  "Yup, in the rocks."

  "You're lying. I've been up there. I noticed that there's no room to move back. It's impossible to pick out something in the cliffs, fifty feet up…"

  Fanny threw her sheet of sandpaper into a plastic cup, wiped her hands and lit a cigarette. These simple gestures provoked a feeling of violent desire in Niémans.

  The young woman exhaled a long puff of blue smoke.

  "The body was in the rock face. But I didn't see it in the rock face"

  "Where, then?"

  "I noticed it in the waters of the river. As a reflection. A white blotch on the surface of the lake."

  Niémans's features relaxed.

  "That's just what I thought."

  "Is that really important as regards the investigations?"

  "No. But I like everything to be clear."

  Niémans paused for a moment, then went on:

  "You're a rock climber, aren't you?"

  "How did you guess?"

  "I don't know…because of the region. And you do look extremely…sporty."

  She turned round and opened her arms toward the mountains, which overlooked the valley. It was the first time she had smiled.

  "This is my home turf, superintendent. I know these mountains like the back of my hand, from the Grand Pic de Belledonne to the Grandes Rousses. When I'm not shooting the rapids, I'm climbing the summits."

  "In your opinion, could only a climber have positioned the body in the rock face?"

  Fanny became serious once more. She observed the glowing tip of her cigarette.

  "No, not necessarily. The rocks almost form a natural staircase. On the other hand, you'd have to be extremely strong to be able to carry the body without losing your balance."

  "One of my inspectors thinks that the killer climbed up from the other side instead, where the slope is less steep, then lowered the body down on a rope."

  "That would be one hell of a long way round." She hesitated, then went on. "In fact, there's a third possibility, quite simple, if you know a little about climbing."

  "Which is?"

  Fanny Ferreira stubbed her cigarette out on her heel and threw it away.

  "Come with me," she commanded.

  They went inside the gymnasium. In the half-light, Niémans made out a heap of mats, the straight shadows of parallel bars, poles, knotted ropes. As they approached the right-hand wall, Fanny remarked:

  "This is my den. No one else comes here during the summer. So I keep my equipment here."

  She lit a stormlight, which hung over a sort of workbench. On it were various instruments, metal parts with a variety of points and blades, casting silvery reflections or sharp glints. Fanny lit another cigarette.

  Niémans asked her:

  "What's all this?"

  "Picks, snaphooks, triangles, safety catches. Climbing equipment"

  "So?"

  Fanny exhaled once more, with a sequence of simulated hiccups.

  "And so, superintendent, a murderer in possession of this sort of equipment, and who knew how to use it, could quite easily have raised the body up from the river bank."

  Niémans crossed his arms and leant back against the wall. While handling her tools, Fanny kept her cigarette in her mouth. This innocent gesture heightened the policeman's craving. He really did find her extremely attractive.

  "As I told you," she began, "that part of the rock face has a sort of natural staircase. It would be child's play for someone who knew about climbing, or even trekking for that matter, to climb up first without the body."

  "And then?"

  Fanny grabbed a fluorescent green pulley, with a constellation of tiny openings.

  "And then you stick that in the rock, just above the crevice."

  "In the rock! But how? With a hammer? That would take ages, wouldn't it?"

  Behind her screen of cigarette smoke, she replied:

  "You seem to know practically nothing about rock climbing, superintendent." She seized some threaded pitons from the workbench. "Here are some spits. Now, with a rock drill like this one" – she indicated a sort of black, greasy drill – "you can stick several spits into any sort of rock in a matter of seconds. Then you fix your pulley and all you have to do is haul up the body. It's the technique we use for lifting bags up into difficult or narrow spaces."

  Niémans pouted skeptically.

  "I haven't been up there, but I reckon the crevice is extremely narrow. I don't see how the murderer could have crouched inside, then been able to pull up the body with just his arms, and with no pull from his legs. Which takes us back to the same portrait of our killer: a colossus."

  "Who said anything about pulling it up? To raise his victim, all the climber had to do was lower himself down on the other side of the pulley, as a counterweight. The body would then have gone up all on its own."

  The policeman suddenly caught on and smiled at such a simple idea.

  "But then the killer would have to be heavier than his victim, wouldn't he?"

  "Or the same weight. When you throw yourself down, your weight increases. Once the body had been raised, your murderer could have quickly climbed back up, still using the natural steps, then wedged his victim in that theatrical rock fault."

  The superintendent took another look at the spits, screws and rings that were lying on the workbench. It reminded him of a burglar's set of tools, but a particular sort of burglar – someone who breaks through altitudes and gravity.

  "How long would all that take?"

  "I could do it in less than ten minutes."

  Niémans nodded. The killer's profile was becoming clearer. The two of them went back outside. The sun was filtering through the clouds, shimmering on the mountain peaks. The policeman asked: "Do you teach at the university?"

  "Geology."

  "More exactly?"

  "I teach several subjects: rock taxonomy, tectonic displacements and glaciology, too – the evolution of glaciers."

  "You look very young."

  "I got my PhD when I was twenty. By then, I was already a junior lecturer. I'm the youngest doctor in France. I'm now twenty-five and a tenured professor."

  "A real university whiz kid."

  "That's right. A whiz kid. Daughter and granddaughter of emeritus professors, here in Guernon."

  "So you're part of the clan?"

  "What clan?"

  "One of my lieutenants studied at Guernon. He told me how the university has a separate elite, made up of the children of the university lecturers…"

  Fanny shook her head maliciously.

  "I'd prefer to call it a big family. The children you're talking about grow up in the university, amidst learning and culture. They then get excellent results. Nothing very surprising about that, is there?"

  "Even in sporting competitions?"

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "That comes from the mountain air."

  Niémans pressed on:

  "I suppose you knew Rémy Caillois. What was he like?" Without any hesitation, Fanny replied:

  "A loner. Introverted. Sullen, even. But extremely brilliant. Dazzlingly cultivated. There was a rumor going round…that he had read every book
in the library."

  "Do you think there was any truth in that?"

  "I don't know. But he certainly knew the library well enough. It was his cave, his refuge, his earth."

  "He was very young, too, wasn't he?"

  "He grew up in the library. His father was head librarian before him." Niémans casually paced forward.

  "I didn't know that. Were the Caillois also part of your `big family'?"

  "Definitely not. Rémy was even hostile to us. Despite all his culture, he never got the results he was hoping for. I think…or rather, I suppose he was jealous of us."

  "What was his subject?"

  "Philosophy, I believe. He was trying to finish his thesis."

  "What was it about?"

  "I've no idea."

  The superintendent paused. He looked up at the mountains. Under the increasing glare of the sun, they looked like dazzled giants. Another question:

  "Is his father still alive?"

  "No. He passed on a few years ago. A climbing accident."

  "There was nothing suspicious about it?"

  "What are you after? He died in an avalanche. The one on the Grande Lance of Allemond, in '93. You're every inch a cop."

  "So we have two rock-climbing librarians. Father and son. Who both died in the mountains. That is a bit of a coincidence, isn't it?"

  "Who said that Rémy was killed in the mountains?"

  "True. But he set off on a hike on Saturday morning. He must have been attacked by the killer up there. Perhaps the murderer knew the route he was tatting and…"

  "Rémy wasn't the sort of person who follows regular routes. Nor one who tells others where he's going. He was very…secretive."

  Niémans nodded his head.

  "Thank you, young lady. You know the form – if you think of anything that may be of importance, then phone me on one of these numbers."

  Niémans jotted down the numbers of his mobile and of a room which the vice-chancellor had given him at the university – he had preferred to set up base inside the university rather than with the gendarmerie. He murmured:

  "See you soon."

  The young woman did not look up. The policeman was leaving when she said:

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  She stared at him with her eyes of crystal. Niémans felt decidedly uneasy. Her irises were too light. They were made of glass, white water, as chilling as frost.

  "Fire away," he replied.

  "On the radio, they said…Well, is it true that you were one of the team that killed Jacques Mesrine?"

  "I was young then. But it's true. I was there."

  "I was wondering…What does it feel like afterward?"

  "After what?"

  "After something like that"

  Niémans moved toward the young woman. Instinctively, she flinched. But, with a touch of arrogance, she bravely looked back at him.

  "It will always be a pleasure talking to you, Fanny. But you will never get a word out of me about that. Nor about what I lost that day."

  The questioner lowered her eyes. Softly, she said:

  "I see."

  "No, you don't see. Which is just as well for you."

  CHAPTER 6

  The trickling water dripped onto his back. Niémans had borrowed a pair of hiking boots from the gendarmerie and was now ascending the natural staircase in the rock face, which was a reasonably easy climb. When he reached the height of the crevice, he took a careful look at the narrow opening where the body had been discovered. Then he examined the surrounding rock face. With his hands protected by Gore-Tex gloves he felt for possible traces of spits in the wall.

  Holes in the stone.

  The wind, laden with drops of icy water, beat against his face. It was a sensation Niémans liked. Despite the circumstances, he had experienced a strong feeling of fulfillment on reaching the lake. Maybe the killer had chosen this site for that very reason: it was a place of calm and serenity, pure and uncluttered. A place where jade waters soothed violent souls.

  The superintendent found nothing. He continued his search around the niche: no trace of any spits. He knelt on the ledge and ran his hands over the inner walls of the cavity. Suddenly, his fingers came across an evident opening, right in the middle of the ceiling. He thought fleetingly of Fanny Ferreira. She had been right: the killer, equipped with spits and pulleys, must have hauled up the corpse by using his own body weight. He shoved his arms inside and located three notched, grooved cavities, about eight inches deep, and which formed a triangle – the three prints of the spits that had carried the pulleys. The circumstances of the murder were becoming clearer. Rémy Caillois had been set upon while out hiking. The murderer had strapped him up, tortured, mutilated then killed him in those lonely heights, and had then gone back down into the valley with his victim's body. How? Niémans glanced down forty feet below, there where the waters turned into a mirror of lacquer. On the stream. The killer must have descended the river in a canoe or something similar. But why had he gone to such lengths? Why had he not just left the body at the scene of the crime?

  The policeman cautiously climbed back down. When on the bank, he removed his gloves, turned his back to the rocks and examined the shadow of the crevice on the perfectly smooth water. The reflection was as steady as a picture. He now felt sure that this place was a sanctuary. Calm and pure. And that was perhaps why the killer had chosen it. In any case, the investigator was now certain about one thing.

  His killer was an experienced rock climber.

  Niémans's saloon car was equipped with a VHF transmitter, but he never used it. No more than he used his cell phone when it came to confidential calls, it being even less secure. For the last few years, he had used a pager, varying from time to time its brand and model. No one else could intercept this form of communication, which necessitated a password. It was a trick he had learnt from Parisian drug dealers, who had immediately caught on to how discreet pagers were. The superintendent had given his number and password to Joisneau, Barnes and Vermont. As he got into his car he took it out of his pocket and switched it on. No messages.

  He started his car and drove back to the university.

  It was now eleven in the morning. Occasional figures crossed the green esplanade. A few students were running on the track in the stadium, which stood slightly away from the group of concrete blocks.

  The officer turned at the crossroads and headed back toward the main building. This immense bunker was eight storeys high and six hundred yards long. He parked and consulted his map. Apart from the library, the huge construction contained the medicine and physics lecture halls. On the upper floors were the rooms set aside for practical work. And on the top floor there were the boarders' rooms. The campus janitor had marked, with a red felt-tip pen, the room occupied by Rémy Caillois and his young wife.

  Pierre Niémans walked past the library doors, which were adjacent to the main entrance, and reached the hall: an open-plan construction lit by large bay windows. The walls were decorated with naïve frescoes, which shone in the morning sunlight, and the end of the hall, several hundred yards away, vanished into a sort of mineral haze. It was a place of Stalinist dimensions, utterly unlike the pale marble and brown wood of Parisian universities. Or, at least, that was what Niémans supposed. He had never before set foot in a university in Paris or anywhere else.

  He climbed up a staircase of suspended marble steps, each block bent into a hairpin and separated by vertical strips. Something the architect had dreamt up, in the same overwhelming style as the rest. Every other neon light was broken, so Niémans crossed regions of utter darkness before emerging into zones of excessive brilliance.

  He finally reached a narrow corridor, punctuated by small doors. He wandered down this black shaft – here, all the light bulbs had given up the ghost – looking for number 34, the Caillois's flat.

  The door was ajar.

  With two fingers, the policeman pushed the thin piece of plywood open. Silence and half-light welcomed h
im. Niémans found himself in a little hall. At the end, a stream of light crossed the narrow corridor. It was enough to enable him to make out the frames that hung on the walls. They contained black-and-white photographs, apparently dating from the 1930s or 1940s. Olympic athletes in full flight spiralled into the sky, or dug their heels into the ground, in postures of religious pride. Their faces, figures and positions gave off a sort of worrying perfection, the inhuman purity of statues. Niémans thought of the university architecture. It all fitted together in a rather uneasy way.

  Beneath these images, he noticed a portrait of Rémy Caillois and took it down to get a better look. The victim had been a handsome, smiling youth with short hair and drawn features. His eyes shone with an extremely alert sparkle.

  "Who are you?"

  Niémans turned his head. A female form, draped in a raincoat, stood at the end of the corridor. Still a kid. She, too, could scarcely be twenty-five. Her shoulder-length fair hair framed a thin ravaged face, whose paleness brought out the dark rings around her eyes. Her features were bony, but delicate. This woman's beauty emerged only in moments of crisis, as though it were the echo of a first feeling of uneasiness.

  "I'm Superintendent Pierre Niémans," he announced.

  "And you come in like that without knocking?"

  "I'm sorry. The door was open. You are Rémy Caillois's wife?"

  Her reply was to snatch the portrait out of Niémans's hands and hang it back on the wall. Then, walking back into the room to the left, she took off her raincoat. Niémans had a surreptitious glimpse of a pale emaciated chest in the hanging folds of an ancient pullover. He shuddered.

  "Come in," she said despite herself.

  Niémans found himself in a cramped living-room, with a neat austere decor. Modern paintings hung on the walls. Symmetrical lines, distressing colors, incomprehensible stuff. The policeman took no notice. But one detail did strike him: there was a strong chemical smell in the room. A smell of paste. The Caillois must have just redecorated their flat. This detail cut him to the quick. For the first time he shivered at the thought of this couple's ruined hopes, the ashes of happiness that must still be glowing beneath that woman's grief. He adopted a serious tone: