Standing in the courtyard, he finishes a cigarette whose stub has begun to burn his fingers and gazes perplexedly over all this activity.
“Well?” Camille says. “I’m guessing the magistrate didn’t hang around?”
Armand thinks about saying something, but he’s philosophical; he’s learned the virtue of patience.
“It’s not like he came out to the crime scene on the Périphérique either,” Camille goes on. “Pity, because it’s not every day you get to see a criminal apprehended by an articulated lorry. Still …”
Camille deliberately checks his watch. Armand, unflappable, stares at his shoelaces. Louis seems to be mesmerised by the outline of an excavator.
“Still, at three in the morning, he’s probably getting some kip. I mean, coming out with that level of bullshit all day long must take it out of a man.”
Armand drops the microscopic remnant of the cigarette butt and sighs.
“What? What did I say?” Camille says.
“Nothing,” Armand says, “nothing. So are we going to do some fucking work or what?”
He’s right. Camille and Louis elbow their way through to Trarieux’s apartment, which is also crawling with techs from l’identité judiciaire, and since the place isn’t exactly roomy, everyone tries to rub along.
Verhœven takes a general overview. It’s a smallish apartment, rooms tidy, crockery tidied away, tools set out like a hardware shop window and an impressive stockpile of beer. Enough to get all of Nicaragua pissed. Apart from that, no papers, no books, not even a notepad: an illiterate’s apartment.
There is one curious thing about the scene: a teenager’s bedroom.
“The son, Pascal,” Louis says, checking his notes.
Unlike the rest of the apartment, this room obviously hasn’t been cleaned in ages; it smells of must and damp mouldering laundry. There’s an Xbox 360 with a wireless controller caked with dust. Only the huge screen of the state-of-the-art computer looks as though it’s been recently cleaned, probably a quick wipe with the back of a sleeve. A crime scene examiner is already checking the contents of the hard drive before it’s taken away for a thorough analysis.
“Games, games, more games,” the tech reports, “internet connection …”
Camille goes on listening as he checks out the contents of a wardrobe being photographed by another officer.
“Porn sites …” adds the guy checking out the computer. “Video games and porn. My kid’s just the same.”
“Thirty-six.”
Everyone turns to look at Louis.
“Trarieux’s son is thirty-six,” Louis says.
“O.K.,” the C.S.E. says. “Well, that obviously puts things in a different light …”
In the wardrobe, Camille itemises Trarieux’s arsenal. The building site security manager plainly took his job very seriously: baseball bat, cosh, knuckledusters – he went on his rounds fully equipped. Surprising not to find a pit bull.
“The pit bull here is Trarieux,” Camille says to Louis, who had made the observation. Then, to the officer checking the computer: “Anything else?”
“Couple of e-mails. Not many. Then again, given the guy’s spelling …”
“Your kid’s just the same?”
This time the officer looks irked. It’s different when he says it.
Camille peers at the monitor. The guy’s got a point. From what he can see the messages are inoffensive, the spelling almost phonetic.
Camille snaps on the latex gloves proffered by Louis and picks up a photograph someone has found in a chest of drawers. A snapshot clearly taken a couple of months ago since it shows the son with his father on the building site; you can see the site and the bulldozer through the window. Not exactly a handsome lad, tall and lanky with the face of a spoiled brat, a long nose. He thinks of the images of the girl in the cage. Distraught but still pretty. Not exactly a matching pair.
“Looks thick as pigshit,” Camille mutters.
15
She’s remembered something, something she heard somewhere. Whenever you see a rat, there’s nine others nearby. So far she’s seen seven. They’ve fought over the rope, but especially over the kibble. Strangely, the biggest rats don’t seem to be the most voracious. They seem to be strategists. Two in particular. Utterly oblivious to Alex’s screams, her insults, they spend most of their time on the top of the cage. The thing she finds most terrifying is when they sit up on their hind paws and sniff the air. They’re huge, monstrous. Over time, some of the rats become more insistent as though they’ve worked out that she does not represent a threat. They become bolder. Earlier this evening a medium-sized rat, trying to scrabble over the others, fell through the slats and landed on her back. Nauseated by the physical contact, she let out a scream – there was a brief uncertainty among the other rats, but the disturbance didn’t last long. A few minutes later, they were back in their serried ranks. One of the rats – a young one, Alex suspects – is particularly persistent, particularly greedy; it creeps right up and sniffs her, she inches away, but it just keeps coming – it retreats only when she screams at the top of her lungs and spits at it.
Trarieux hasn’t been for a long time now, a day at least, maybe two. Now another day drags on. If only she could know what day it is, what time it is … She’s surprised he hasn’t been, surprised he’s missed three or four visits in a row. What worries her is that she might run out of water. She tries to save as much as she can and, fortunately, managed to drink very little yesterday. She has almost half a bottle left, but she was relying on him to bring more. And the rats are less skittish when they’ve got dog food; when there’s none, they become irritable and impatient.
Ironically, what panics Alex is the thought of Trarieux abandoning her. Of him leaving her in this cage to die of starvation, of thirst, watched by the beady eyes of rats that will surely become more daring before long. The larger rats are already looking at her in a worrying way; she can’t help but ascribe intentions to their behaviour.
Since she saw the first rat there’s never been a period of more than twenty minutes when one or other of them didn’t scuttle across the top of the cage or scrabble down the rope to check for kibble.
Some of them swing in the wicker basket, staring at her.
16
Seven o’clock in the morning.
The divisionnaire has taken Camille to one side.
“Listen, this case – I need you to play it straight, O.K.?”
Camille doesn’t promise anything.
“Well, that’s a good start …” Le Guen says.
And he’s right. From the moment Vidard shows up, Camille can’t help throwing the door open, gesturing to the photographs of the young woman that have now been pinned to the wall and announcing: “Since you’re so focused on the victim, monsieur le juge, this should make your day. She seems perfect.”
The pictures have been enlarged and plastered on the wall so that they look like S.&M. porn. They truly turn your stomach. In one shot, all that is visible of the girl’s haunted face is a horizontal strip framed by two slats; her body, curled into a foetal position, looks broken, the head tilted, pressed against the top of the cage. In another, a close-up of her hands, the fingernails bleeding probably from clawing at the wood. Another shot of her hands, clutching a bottle of water clearly too big to fit between the slats. You can picture the prisoner having to drink out of the palm of her hand like a castaway. Clearly she’s not been allowed out of the cage because she’s been forced to relieve herself as she squats there and her legs are spattered with filth. Dirty, bruised, she’s been beaten, probably raped. But the pictures are all the more disturbing because she is still alive. It’s impossible to imagine what lies in store for her.
But faced with this spectacle, and in spite of Camille’s taunting, the magistrate remains calm, studies the photographs one by one.
Everyone falls silent. Everyone meaning Armand, Louis and the six detectives Le Guen has seconded to the case. Coming up wi
th a team like that at a moment’s notice took some doing.
The magistrate, his face solemn and pensive, moves slowly along the line of photographs. He might be a junior minister opening an exhibition. He may be a stupid little fool and a bastard, but he’s not a coward, Camille thinks as the man turns to face him.
“Commandant Verhœven,” he says, “I know you disagree with my decision to storm Trarieux’s residence; for my part I disagree with the way you have been running this investigation from the beginning.”
Seeing Camille open his mouth, the magistrate raises a hand, palm out, to cut him off.
“What we have is a difference of opinion, one that I propose we settle later. It seems to me that, whatever you might think, the most pressing matter now is to rapidly locate this … victim.”
He may be a bastard, but he’s undeniably a cunning bastard. Le Guen lets two or three seconds of silence pass then coughs. But the magistrate quickly turns to the team and continues.
“If I may, divisionnaire, I’d like to congratulate your men on tracking Trarieux down so quickly with such scant evidence. Remarkable work.”
This really is too much.
“Are you running for election?” Camille says. “Or is this a particular approach you’ve patented?”
Le Guen coughs again. Another silence. Louis purses his lips delightedly. Armand smiles down at his shoes. Everyone else wonders what the hell is going on.
“Commandant,” says the magistrate, “I’m well aware of your service record. I’m also aware of those details of your personal history intimately related to your work.”
This time, the smiles of Louis and Armand freeze. Camille and Le Guen go into high alert mode. The magistrate has stepped forward, though not close enough to seem as though he is eyeing the commandant scornfully.
“If you should feel that this case … how shall I put it … might have too great an impact on your personal life, I would of course understand.”
The warning is clear, the threat only thinly disguised.
“I’m sure that Divisionnaire Le Guen could bring in someone less conflicted to run the case. But, but, but …” he spreads his hands wide now, as though holding back the clouds, “but I leave that to your commanding officer. I have every confidence.”
As far as Camille is concerned, this settles the matter: the guy is a grade-A arsehole.
Camille has long understood how those murderers feel, the ones who kill without meaning to, in a fit of blind rage; he’s arrested dozens of them. Husbands who strangled their wives, wives who stabbed their husbands, sons who pushed their fathers out of windows, friends who shot friends, neighbours who ran over their neighbour’s son – now he racks his brains trying to remember a case where a police commandant drew his service revolver and put a bullet through the forehead of a magistrate. But Camille says nothing, merely nods. It takes every ounce of strength to say nothing in spite of the magistrate’s dismissive reference to Irène. In fact it is the reason he finds the strength to hold his tongue: because a woman has been abducted and he has sworn to himself that he will find her alive. The magistrate knows this. He understands and clearly decides to take advantage of Camille’s self-imposed silence.
“Very good,” he says with evident satisfaction. “Now that ego has deferred to the spirit of public service, I think you can all get back to work.”
Camille is going to kill him. He knows this. It will take as long as it takes, but he will kill him. With his bare hands.
“Divisionnaire.” The magistrate turns to Le Guen, and making good his exit says in measured tones, “It goes without saying I expect to be kept closely informed.”
*
“We have two key priorities,” Camille says to his team. “First, work up a profile of this Trarieux guy, get to know everything about his life. Somewhere in there we’ll find a link to our girl and maybe her identity. Because our main problem is that we still don’t know anything about her, we don’t know who she is, so obviously we don’t know why he abducted her. This leads me to the second priority: our only lead on Trarieux is the list of contacts in his mobile and the one on his son’s computer – which Trarieux obviously used. The list is not up to date, a couple of weeks old to judge from the call log, but it’s all we’ve got.”
It’s not much. The only facts they have right now are alarming. No-one can say what Trarieux intended when he locked the girl in that suspended cage, but now that he’s dead, they all know she hasn’t got long to live. None of them puts the danger into words – dehydration, starvation – they all know such a death is slow and painful. Not to mention the rats. Marsan is the first to speak. He’ll be acting as liaison between Verhœven’s squad and the forensics teams working on the case.
“Even if we do find her alive,” he says, “dehydration can have irreversible neurological consequences. By the time we get to her she might be a vegetable.”
He doesn’t pull his punches. And he’s right, Camille thinks. I don’t dare because I’m scared, but we’re not going to find this girl by being scared. He shakes himself.
“What do we have on the van?” he says.
“Forensics went over it with a fine-toothed comb last night,” Marsan says, checking his notes. “Found hair and blood, so we’ve got D.N.A. for the victim, but since she’s not on file, we still don’t know who she is.”
“What about the E-FIT?”
Trarieux was carrying a picture of his son in his inside pocket. It was taken at a funfair and showed the son with a girl whose arm was draped round his neck, but the photograph was soaked in blood and, besides, it was taken from some distance away. The girl looks quite fat, and there’s no guarantee it’s the same person. The photographs on the mobile are more promising.
“We should end up with something good,” Marsan says. “It’s a cheap mobile, but we’ve got several shots of the face from different angles, pretty much everything we need. You’ll have it this afternoon.”
Analysing the location will be crucial. The problem is that all the shots were taken in close-up or tight close-up; there’s very little of the location where the girl is being held. Digital forensics have been over them, making measurements, analyses, projections …
“We still don’t know what kind of building it is. Given the date on the photographs and the available light in the pictures we know the room faces north-east. That’s pretty common. There’s no perspective in the pictures, no depth of field, so it’s impossible to calculate the dimensions of the room. The light is coming from above, so we estimate the ceilings are at least fourteen feet high. Maybe more, we can’t be sure. The floor is concrete and there seems to be a leak from somewhere. All the photographs were taken in natural light so there might not be any electricity supply. As for the materials used by the kidnapper, from what little we can tell there’s nothing out of the ordinary. The crate is made of lengths of untreated timber you can get anywhere, it’s screwed together, the steel ring it’s suspended from is standard issue and there’s nothing on the rope either – it’s standard hemp rope. From what we can tell, the rats aren’t specially bred. So we’re probably looking at an abandoned, disused building.”
“The dates on the photographs prove Trarieux visited at least twice a day,” Camille says. “So it has to be somewhere in the Paris suburbs.”
Everyone around him nods in agreement. Camille can tell they knew this already. Fleetingly he imagines himself at home with Doudouche. He doesn’t want to be here anymore; he should have handed the case over when Morel got back. He closes his eyes. Pulls himself together.
Louis suggests Armand take charge of making a short description of the place based on the limited information they have and urgently circulate it to stations all over the Île-de-France. “Yeah, of course,” Camille agrees. They’re under no illusions. Their information is so generic it applies to three out of five buildings and, according to the figures Armand has collated from other police stations, there are sixty-four sites in the Paris area classifi
ed as “industrial wasteland”, not to mention hundreds of buildings and warehouses standing empty.
“Anything in the media?” Camille asks Le Guen.
“You kidding?”
*
Louis heads down the corridor towards the exit, then turns and hurries back.
“I was thinking …” he says to Camille. “It’s all a bit sophisticated, don’t you think? Building a fillette? Maybe a bit too clever for someone like Trarieux?”
“No, Louis, I don’t. I think you’re too clever for Trarieux. He didn’t build a ‘fillette’; that’s your word, a nice obscure word that shows everyone how cultivated you are. But he didn’t build a fillette: he built a cage. And it’s too small.”
*
Slumped in his chair, Le Guen listens to Camille. His eyes are closed; he looks as if he’s asleep. This is how he concentrates.
“Jean-Pierre Trarieux,” Camille begins. “Fifty-three years old, born 11 October, 1953. A qualified metalworker with twenty-seven years’ experience in aeronautical workshops – starting out at Sud Aviation in 1970. Laid off in 1997, two years on the dole, he ends up getting a maintenance job at René-Pontibiau Hospital, laid off again two years later, unemployed again, in 2002 he gets a job working security on the building site. He gives up his apartment and goes to live on site.”
“Violent?”
“Brutal. His personnel record is full of scraps and fights; the guy’s got a hair-trigger temper. At least that’s what his wife thinks. Roseline. Married her in 1970. One son, Pascal, born the same year. Now that’s where things get interesting, but I’ll get back to the son.”
“No,” Le Guen interrupts him. “Tell me now.”
“He was reported missing. July last year.”
“Go on.”
“I’m waiting on further information but, roughly speaking, Pascal fucked up pretty much everything: school, vocational college, apprenticeship, job. As failures go, he’s got the full set. He does unskilled labour – removal man, that kind of thing. Emotionally unstable. The father manages to get him a job in the hospital where he works – this is in 2000. They’re co-workers. The following year they’re both made redundant – that’s working-class solidarity – and they’re mates on the dole. When the father gets the security job in 2002, the son comes to live with him. Let me remind you, Pascal is thirty-six! We’ve been through his room in his father’s apartment. Games console, football posters and a broadband connection for looking at porn sites. If it weren’t for the six packs of beer under the bed, you’d think he was a teenager. In books, when they’re afraid it might not be clear, people say an ‘overgrown teenager’. Then – bang – July 2006 the father reports the son missing.”
Alex Page 9
