Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Though Mme Bruneau is under no illusions about what her husband was like and remembers how violent he could be, she wasn’t married to a gangland criminal. The phrase “involved in a police chase” should come as a shock, but she doesn’t bat an eyelid.

  “Madame Bruneau …” Camille is being patient precisely because there’s no time to lose, “we believe Pascal’s disappearance and his father’s death are connected. In fact we’re convinced they are. The more quickly you can answer our questions, the better our chances of finding your son.”

  You could trawl the dictionary for hours, but “dishonest” is the only word to describe Camille’s approach. Because as far as he is concerned, there’s no doubt Pascal is dead. Using the son as emotional blackmail may be morally wrong, but he’s not ashamed since it might help him find someone else alive.

  “Some days ago, your husband kidnapped a girl, a young woman. He has been holding her somewhere but died before he could tell us where. Right now this woman is locked up somewhere. If we don’t find her, Madame Bruneau, she’ll die.”

  He allows this information to sink in. Roseline’s eyes dart right and left like a pigeon’s; she is overwhelmed by conflicting ideas. What matters is what she decides to do next. What has this kidnapping got to do with my son’s disappearance? This is the question she should ask. If she doesn’t ask it, it’s because she already knows the answer.

  “I need you to tell me everything you know … No, no, hang on, Madame Bruneau! You’re about to tell me you don’t know anything, but that would be a very bad move – take my word for it, the worst possible thing you could do. Take your time; think about it for a minute. Your husband abducted a woman who is connected in some way to the disappearance of your son. And that woman will die.”

  She glances left, right, jerking her whole head now. Camille should put a photograph of the woman on the desk in front of her, try to shock her, but something stops him.

  “Jean-Pierre called me …”

  Camille takes a breath. It’s not exactly a victory, but it’s an achievement. At least he’s got things moving.

  “When was this?”

  “I can’t remember, about a month ago.”

  “And … ?”

  Roseline Bruneau stares at the floor. Slowly, she tells him. Trarieux gets the official letter informing him of the unsuccessful search, he’s furious – this means the police think Pascal ran away, that they’re not prepared to investigate, it’s over. Since the police aren’t prepared to do anything, Trarieux tells her he will deal with it. He has an idea.

  “It’s that slut …”

  “Slut?”

  “That’s what he called Pascal’s girlfriend.”

  “He didn’t think much of her, then.”

  Roseline Bruneau sighs. In order to explain, she has to start at the beginning.

  “You have to understand that Pascal was always a bit … a bit slow, d’you know what I’m saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “There was no badness in him; he was just a bit simple. I never wanted him to live with his father. Jean-Pierre had him drinking and getting into fights, but Pascal loved his dad – I never understood what he saw in him, but he loved his dad. Then one day this girl shows up, and it doesn’t take long before she’s got him wrapped around her little finger. Pascal’s crazy about her … that’s no surprise. Never could handle girls … Not that there were many before her, and it had always ended badly. So anyway, this girl shows up and she pulls out all the stops. So obviously he falls head over heels.”

  “What was the girl’s name? Did you meet her?”

  “Nathalie? No, never clapped eyes on her. All I ever knew was her first name. When Pascal called me it was always Nathalie this and Nathalie that …”

  He didn’t introduce her to you? Or to his father?”

  “No. He was always telling me he was going to bring her down to meet me, telling me I’d love her …”

  It’s a whirlwind romance. Mme Bruneau tells him Pascal met Nathalie in June – she doesn’t know where or how – then in July he disappears with her.

  “At first I wasn’t worried,” she says. “I thought, When she dumps the poor kid he’ll go back to his father’s and that’ll be that. But his father was furious. Tell the truth, I think he was jealous. Pascal had always been the apple of his eye. He was a terrible husband, but he was a good father.”

  She glances up at Camille, clearly shocked by this assessment of her husband. She has just said something that she’s always believed but never realised. She stares at the floor again.

  “When I found out Pascal had cleaned out his father’s bank account and disappeared, I was like him, I thought this girl, well, you know … It wasn’t like Pascal, to steal from his father.”

  She shakes her head. This is something she knows for certain.

  Camille remembers the photograph of Pascal Trarieux found in the father’s apartment and his heart bleeds. As a draughtsman, he has an excellent visual memory. He can see the boy standing, one hand on the bulldozer, looking awkward and ill at ease. His trousers are far too short; he looks pathetic. What do you do when you have a simpleton for a son, when you come to terms with that fact?

  “So eventually, your husband tracked down this girl?”

  Her reaction is instant.

  “How would I know? All he told me was that he was looking for her, that sooner or later she’d tell him where Pascal was … what she did to him.”

  “What she did to him?”

  Roseline Bruneau stares out of the window; this is her way of holding back her tears.

  “Pascal would never run away, he’s not … How can I put it? He’s not intelligent enough to disappear for long.”

  She turned to Camille as she spoke, her words like a slap in the face. In fact, she’s clearly sorry for what she has said.

  “Like I said, he’s a simple boy. He doesn’t know many people; he’s devoted to his father. He wouldn’t deliberately go for weeks, for months without getting in touch; he wouldn’t be capable. So something must have happened to him.”

  “What exactly did your husband say to you? Did he tell you what he was planning to do? About …”

  “No, he didn’t stay on the line for long. He’d been drinking, as usual, and when he’s on the bottle he can turn nasty, thinks the whole world is against him. He wanted to find this girl, he wanted her to tell him where his son was – that’s what he called to tell me.”

  “And how did you react?”

  In ordinary circumstances, it takes considerable talent to lie convincingly; it requires a great deal of energy, creativity, self-control and a good memory – it’s harder than people think. Lying to an authority figure is even more difficult because it requires all these qualities at a much higher level … And Roseline Bruneau is not cut out for such things. Though she’s tried, now that she’s let her guard down, Camille can read her like a book. And it’s exhausting. He draws a hand over his eyes.

  “What exactly did you call him? I’m guessing by that stage you didn’t mince your words; I’m guessing you told him exactly what you thought of him – am I wrong?”

  It’s a convoluted question. “Yes” and “no” lead in different directions, but neither seems to offer her a way out.

  “I don’t know …”

  “Oh, but you do know, Madame Bruneau, you know exactly what I’m saying. That night, you finally told him what you thought of him. You told him he hadn’t a hope in hell of succeeding where the police had failed. In fact you went further. I don’t know the precise words you used, but I know you really laid into him. ‘You’re an arsehole, Jean-Pierre, you’re a pathetic, dickless moron’ or something like that.”

  She opens her mouth, but Camille doesn’t give her time to speak. He’s jumped up from his chair and he’s shouting now, because he’s been pussyfooting around for long enough.

  “What exactly would I find if I checked the messages on your mobile, Madame Bruneau?”

&n
bsp; She doesn’t move a muscle, but her eyes bore into the ground as though she wants it to open up and swallow her.

  “I’ll tell you what I’d find – photographs sent to you by your ex-husband. Don’t even imagine that you can get out of this; it’s right there in his call log. I can even tell you what’s in these photos: a girl in a wooden crate. You questioned his manhood, you were hoping it would force him to do something. And when you received those pictures, you were scared. Scared that you might be charged as an accessory.”

  Camille has a sudden doubt.

  “Unless …”

  He stops, goes over to her, crouches down low and looks up into her face. She doesn’t move.

  “Oh shit,” Camille says, getting to his feet again.

  Some moments for a policeman are particularly tough.

  “That’s not why you didn’t get in touch with the police, is it? You weren’t afraid we might think you were an accessory. You did it because, like your husband, you blame this girl for your son’s disappearance. You didn’t say anything because you thought she was getting what she deserved, isn’t that it?”

  Camille takes a deep breath. He feels shattered.

  “You’d better hope we find her soon, Madame Bruneau, and not just for her sake. For yours. Because if we don’t, I’ll be charging you as an accessory to torture and aggravated murder. And any other charges I can find that might stick.”

  As he leaves his office, Camille is under enormous pressure; time is ticking away at an incredible speed.

  “And what exactly have we got?” he thinks.

  Nothing. It’s driving him mad.

  21

  The greediest one is not the piebald, it’s a large grey rat. It loves blood. It fights off the other rats so it can be first. It’s reckless and vicious.

  For Alex, for the past few hours every minute has been a battle. She had to kill two of them. To get the others angry, to get them excited, to show them she was something to be feared.

  She skewered the first rat with the sliver of wood, her only weapon, then crushed it under her bare foot until it died while it writhed like a soul in pain and squealed like a stuck pig, trying to bite her. Alex drowned it out with her screams; the rat’s body started twitching and wriggling like a large fish – they’ve got a lot of strength, these fuckers, when they’re dying. The last moments were excruciating; the rat had stopped moving, blood gushing from it as it moaned and whimpered, eyes bulging from their sockets, mouth quivering, teeth bared, still ready to bite. When it was over, Alex kicked it onto the floor.

  After that, the rats realised this was open war.

  With the second rat, she had to wait until it came very close. It could smell blood, its whiskers twitching frantically; it was certainly very excited, but it was cautious too. Alex let it come – she even called to it: “Come on, come on, you little fucker, come to Mummy …” And as soon as it was within reach, she managed to trap it against the board and plunge the shard of wood into its throat. It staggered backwards as though about to perform a dangerous jump and she kicked it smartly between the slats and it hit the floor where it lay whimpering for an hour, the shard still sticking out of its neck.

  Alex has no weapons now, but they don’t know that and they are afraid.

  And she feeds them.

  Using what was left of the water, she diluted the blood coursing from her injured hand, then reached above her head and saturated the rope holding up the cage. Now that there’s no water left, she keeps it wet with her blood. This, obviously, makes the rats even happier. When she stops bleeding, she stabs herself somewhere else using another splinter – this one is smaller, much too small to kill a rat – but it’s sharp enough to pierce a vein in her calf, in her arm, sharp enough to make her bleed – and that’s all she needs.

  When the blood starts flowing, she collects it in her palm, reaches up between the planks and smears it onto the rope.

  All around the rats are watching, not knowing whether to attack her … then she pulls her hand back and they fight over the fresh blood, gnawing into the rope to get to it; they can’t get enough.

  But now they’ve had a taste of blood, now that she’s given them her own blood to taste, nothing will stop them.

  Blood drives them into a frenzy.

  22

  Champigny-sur-Marne.

  A large red-brick house by the river. One of the last calls Trarieux made before abducting the girl.

  Her name is Sandrine Bontemps.

  When Louis arrived, she had just finished breakfast and was setting off for work; she had to call to say she’d be late. The young officer took the telephone and calmly explained to her boss that she was helping with an “urgent police matter”. He would have a colleague bring her to her office as soon as possible. For Sandrine Bontemps all this is moving very fast.

  She is prim, a little prissy, twenty-five, maybe twenty-six and clearly out of her depth. As she sits with one buttock perched on the edge of the Ikea sofa, Camille can already see what she will look like in twenty, in thirty years: it’s a little depressing.

  “This man … Trarieux. He was very insistent on the phone … very insistent. And then he came to see me. He scared me.”

  Now, it’s the police who scare her. Especially the little bald guy, the dwarf – he’s obviously in charge. His younger colleague was the one who called her, then hurried round; he was there within twenty minutes. Now he looks as if he’s not even listening, wandering from room to room, firing off questions from the kitchen. He goes upstairs, comes back down, seems edgy, as though sniffing for something. He told her right at the start “We’ve got no time to lose”, but every time she hesitates he interrupts. She doesn’t even know what all this is about. She tries to get things straight in her mind, but she’s being bombarded with questions.

  “Is this her?”

  The dwarf holds out a sketch towards her, a girl’s face, like the sort of E-FIT you see in the movies or in the papers. She recognises the woman immediately – it’s Nathalie, but not as she knew her. In the drawing, she looks prettier than she does in real life, more sophisticated and – above all – not as fat. She looks cleaner. Her hair is different. Even her eyes are not quite the same. When Sandrine saw her they were blue and though it’s difficult to tell what colour they’re supposed to be in the pencil sketch, they seem much lighter. As a result the E-FIT looks like her … and it doesn’t look like her. The police officers are waiting for a response, a yes or a no, not something in between. In any case, despite any misgivings, Sandrine is positive: it’s her.

  Nathalie Granger.

  The officers glance at each other. “Granger …” said the dwarf dubiously. The younger one takes out his mobile and went out to the garden to make a call. When he comes back, he simply shook his head and the dwarf gives him a look as if to say I’d have put money on it.

  Sandrine talks about the laboratory where Nathalie worked on rue de Planay in the centre of Neuilly-sur-Marne.

  The younger policeman leaves immediately. Sandrine is convinced he’s the one who called half an hour later. Not that she can really tell, the dwarf just keeps repeating “I see, I see”. Sandrine finds this guy infuriating. It’s as if he knows he irritates her but doesn’t give a toss. On the telephone he sounds disappointed. In the young inspector’s absence, the dwarf pesters her with questions about Nathalie.

  “Her hair was always lank, dirty.”

  There are some things you can’t tell a man, even a policeman, but sometimes Nathalie could really be messy. The place was never tidy, the table never cleared, not to mention the tampons floating in the loo – ugh. They weren’t housemates for long, but it was long enough!

  “I don’t really think it would have worked out, Nathalie and me sharing.”

  Sandrine had placed an advertisement looking for a roommate and Nathalie had got in touch, came round to meet her; she seemed nice. She hadn’t looked slovenly that day – she had been very presentable. What she had liked about t
he place was the garden and the attic room that she thought looked romantic. Sandrine had not pointed out that at the height of summer, it was like a sauna.

  “There’s no insulation, you see …”

  The dwarf is looking at her abstractedly, his face like a statue’s. As though he’s thinking about something else.

  Nathalie always paid in advance, always in cash.

  “This was in early June. I urgently needed someone to share; my boyfriend had left me …”

  Sandrine’s personal life irritates the little man: the boyfriend moves in, big love story, and then walks out without even leaving a note a couple of months later. She never saw him again. She’d obviously been signed up at birth for a lifetime of being dumped: first the boyfriend, then Nathalie. This, she confirms, happened on July 14.

  “In the end, she didn’t stay long. She met this guy just after she moved in here, so, obviously …”

  “Obviously what?” he says, exasperated.

  “Well … she’d want to move in with him. That’s normal, isn’t it?”

  “Oh …”

  Sceptical, as though to say Is that all? This guy clearly knows nothing about women, you can tell. The younger one has come back from the laboratory; she heard his siren in the distance. He’s a fast operator, but he still looks as if he’s strolling through life. It’s because he’s got style. And because of the clothes he wears, Sandrine noticed as soon as she saw him: designer labels, top-of-the-range, too. Sandrine could tell at a glance how much his shoes cost: twice her monthly salary. It’s a revelation to her to discover policemen make so much money – you’d never know from the ones you see on T.V.

  The officers had a little confab. All Sandrine overheard was the younger one saying: “never seen …” and then “… yeah, he went there too …”

  “I wasn’t here when she moved out. I always spend the summer at my aunt’s place in …”

  The older one is annoyed. Things aren’t working out the way he wants them to, but that’s not her fault. He sighs and waves his hand as though shooing away a fly. The least he could do is be polite. His colleague gives her a sympathetic smile as though to say Don’t worry, he’s always like this, stay focused. He’s the one who shows her the photograph.