Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

  “Yeah, that’s him, that’s Pascal, Nathalie’s boyfriend.”

  She’s in no doubt about that. And the other picture, the one at the funfair – it’s a little blurred, but it’s obviously them. When Pascal’s father turned up a month ago, he was looking for Nathalie too, not just his son, and he showed her the same picture. Sandrine gave him Nathalie’s work address. After that, she never heard from him again.

  You only have to see the photograph to realise that Pascal isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Not exactly handsome either. And his clothes – sometimes you wondered where on earth he bought them. O.K., Nathalie might have been a bit fat, but she had a beautiful face and you knew that if she made the effort … But Pascal, he looked … difficult to know how to describe it.

  “A bit retarded, to be honest.”

  Not very clever is what she means. He worshipped Nathalie. She brought him home twice or three times, but he never stayed the night. Sandrine even wondered whether they were sleeping together. When he came round, Sandrine could see he was all excited, the way he gawped at Nathalie; he was practically drooling, just waiting for the green light to jump her bones.

  “Though there was this one time. Just once, he slept here. I remember now, it was in July, just before I went to my aunt’s.”

  But Sandrine didn’t hear anything.

  “Which is strange, because my room was right under hers.”

  She bites her lip, realising she’s just admitted eavesdropping. She blushes, but doesn’t say any more; they’ve got the picture. She didn’t hear anything, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Nathalie and Pascal must have … I don’t know … maybe they did it standing up. Or maybe there was nothing to hear, maybe Nathalie wasn’t up for it. This, Sandrine could easily understand. I mean, Pascal …

  “If it was me …” she says priggishly.

  The little one pieces the story together aloud; he might be small, but he’s not stupid, pretty accurate in fact. Nathalie and Pascal disappeared leaving two months’ rent on the kitchen table and enough money to cover the bills. Then there were all the things that Nathalie didn’t take.

  “Things, what things?” he wants to know immediately.

  Suddenly he’s all ears. Sandrine didn’t keep any of the stuff. Nathalie was two sizes bigger than her and besides, her taste in clothes was terrible … There is the magnifying mirror in the bathroom, but Sandrine doesn’t mention this to the police – she uses it for blackheads and nose hairs; besides it’s none of their business. She tells them about the other stuff: the coffee maker, the teapot shaped like a cow, the rainwater tank, the Marguerite Duras novels which were all she seemed to read; she had pretty much the complete works.

  The younger officer says: “Nathalie Granger … that’s the name of one of Duras’ characters, isn’t it?”

  “Really?” the other one says. “From which novel?”

  “Um … it’s from a film called ‘Nathalie Granger’,” the young one says, embarrassed.

  The dwarf slaps his forehead as if to say Duh!, but Sandrine thinks it’s just for effect.

  “For collecting rainwater …” she explains as the dwarf points to the large green tank outside. It was environmentally friendly, collecting all that water – the roof of the house was huge; it was a pity really, she’d talked to the rental agent and to the landlord, but they weren’t interested. Talking about green issues seems to irritate the policeman as well, making her wonder what exactly he is interested in.

  “She bought it just before she left. I found it here when I got back from my aunt’s. She left a little note, apologising for leaving so suddenly. I suppose the rainwater tank was sort of to make up for that, a surprise present.”

  The dwarf finds this funny, “a surprise present”.

  He’s standing in front of the window, the net curtain pulled back. It’s true it’s pretty ugly, that huge green plastic tank at the side of the house with the drainpipes running into it. You can tell it’s cobbled together. But he’s not really looking at it. He’s not really listening either, because as she’s in mid-sentence he flips open his mobile and makes a call.

  “Jean?” he says. “I think I’ve found Trarieux’s son.”

  *

  Time is getting on – she has to call her boss back and the young one talks to him again. No mention of an investigation this time, just some mention of taking samples. An ambiguous phrase, since Sandrine works in a laboratory, as Nathalie did. They were both biologists, although Nathalie never liked to talk about her job. “When I’m off work, I’m off work!”

  Twenty minutes later, it’s action stations. They’ve cordoned off the street, the forensics team in their astronaut suits have overrun the garden with their equipment – cases, spotlights, plastic sheets – trampling all over the flowerbeds. They measured the rainwater tank and then took ridiculous precautions emptying it. They didn’t want the water spilling on the ground.

  “I know what they’re going to find,” the dwarf said. “It’s a dead cert. I’m going to get some kip.”

  He asked Sandrine where Nathalie’s old room was. He lay down on the bed fully clothed; she’s sure he didn’t even take off his shoes.

  The younger officer stayed out in the garden.

  He really is a good-looking guy, and his clothes, his shoes … Even his manners! Sandrine has tried steering the conversation, making it more personal: this house is so big for a single woman, that kind of thing – but he didn’t take the bait.

  She’s convinced he’s gay.

  The forensics team emptied the rainwater tank, moved it out of the way and started digging. They didn’t have to dig far before they found the body. Wrapped in the sort of plastic sheeting you buy in hardware shops.

  It gave Sandrine a bit of a turn. The police kept her back – I don’t think you want to be out here, mademoiselle – so she went back into the house and looked out of the window; they couldn’t stop her doing that – after all, it is her house. What disturbed her was when they lifted the plastic wrapped body and laid it on a gurney: she knew at once it was Pascal.

  She recognised his trainers.

  Peeling back the layers of plastic, they leaned over, calling others to look at something she couldn’t see. She opened the window a crack to listen.

  One of the officers said: “Oh no, that wouldn’t cause this sort of damage …”

  It was at this point that the dwarf came back downstairs.

  He positively skipped into the garden and immediately went over to look at the body.

  He nodded, obviously pretty astonished by what he was seeing.

  He said: “I’m with Brichot: the only thing which could cause that kind of damage is acid.”

  23

  It’s an old-fashioned rope, not the smooth, synthetic kind you get on boats, natural hemp and very thick. It has to be to support a cage like this.

  There are a dozen rats. Those Alex already knows, the ones that were there at the start, and the new arrivals – she doesn’t know where they’ve come from, how they knew. Together they’ve adopted a siege strategy.

  Three or four have taken up positions at one end of the crate; two or three others are on the far side. She assumes that when they decide the time is right, they’ll attack together, but for now something is holding them back: Alex’s energy. She continually screams and swears and taunts them. They know that there is still life in the cage, defiance – they know they will have to fight. Two rats already lie dead on the floor. This apparently gives them pause for thought.

  They constantly sniff the blood, rearing onto their hind paws, snouts straining towards the rope. Feverish with excitement, they take turns in gnawing at the rope with their teeth. Alex doesn’t know how they decide whose turn it is to feast on the blood.

  She doesn’t care. She has stabbed herself again, this time low down on her calf, near the ankle. She found a clean, rich vein. The most difficult thing is keeping them away while she wipes the blood onto the rope.

 
It has already been eaten halfway through. It’s a race against time between Alex and the rope, between which of the two will break first.

  Alex keeps the cage moving, swinging it from side to side, making it more difficult for the rats if they should decide to come and call her to account; and she hopes it also weakens the rope.

  The other reason for her tactic is that she needs the cage to fall at an angle in order for the slats to break. She rocks it as hard as she can, pushes the rats away and douses the rope again. When one rat comes to gnaw on it, she keeps the others at a distance. Alex is absolutely exhausted, dying of thirst. Since the thunderstorms, which went on for more than a day, there are parts of her body she can no longer feel; they’re numb.

  The fat grey rat is getting impatient.

  For an hour now, it has been allowing the others to gorge themselves on the rope. It no longer takes its turn feeding. The rope no longer interests the grey rat. Instead it stares at Alex, making loud, piercing shrieks. And for the first time it pokes its head between the slats and sniffs, lips drawn back like a snake.

  What works for the others no longer works for him. Alex can scream and swear as much as she likes, but the rat doesn’t flinch, claws digging into the wood to stop itself from falling as the cage rocks wildly.

  It clings to the crate and stares at her.

  Alex stares back.

  They’re like lovers on a merry-go-round, gazing deep into each other’s eyes.

  “Come on,” whispers Alex, smiling. Arching her back, she gives the cage all the momentum she can and smiles up at the fat rat above her head. “Come on, Daddy, come on, Mummy has something for you …”

  24

  It left him with a strange feeling, his little siesta in Nathalie’s room. Why had he done it? He doesn’t know. The creaking wooden stairs, the landing stripped of its carpet, the porcelain door handle – all the heat in the house seems to rise to this attic room. It feels like a country house, a family home, with guest rooms only aired and opened up at the onset of summer. Closed the rest of the year.

  Now, it is being used as a junk room. She seemed not to have much in the way of personality; the place looks like a room in a hotel or a bed and breakfast. A few lopsided pictures on the walls, a chest of drawers with one foot missing propped up with books. The bed is soft as a marshmallow – you sink into it so deeply it’s amazing. Camille sits up, heaves himself onto the pillows, and leaning against the head of the bed, he fumbles for his notepad and his pencil. While the forensics team are clearing the earth from under the rainwater tank in the garden, he sketches a face. His own. When he was young, preparing to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, he did hundreds of self-portraits; his mother always claimed it was the only real exercise, the only one that allowed one to find “the appropriate detachment”. She herself had painted dozens of self-portraits. Only one of them remains, in oils, magnificent; he doesn’t like to think about it. And Maud was right: Camille’s problem has always been finding the appropriate detachment. He’s always either too close or too detached. Either he plunges in and disappears, thrashing about, almost drowning, or he remains at a careful distance and is doomed to understand nothing. “What’s missing then is the grain of things,” Camille says. On the notepad, the face that emerges is emaciated, the eyes stare vacantly, a man beaten down by adversity.

  The ceiling of the room is sloping – for most people living here it would mean bending in order to move. But not for someone like him. Camille goes on sketching, but his heart isn’t in it; he feels queasy. His heart is heavy. Sandrine Bontemps, his irritation, his impatience – he can be impossible sometimes. He just wants this case over and done with.

  Things aren’t right with him and he knows why. He needs to find the grain.

  A while ago, he found it in the portrait of Nathalie Granger. Before that, in the pictures on Trarieux’s mobile; she had simply looked like a victim. One more case. This is what he had relegated her to, this girl: a kidnapping case. But in the E-FIT put together by the forensic art team, she became a real person. A photograph is realism. But a drawing is reality, your reality, fleshed out by your imagination, your fantasies, your education, your life. When he held out the picture to show Sandrine Bontemps, when he saw the face upside down like a swimmer, it struck him as entirely different. Had she killed this pillock Pascal Trarieux? More than likely, but it didn’t matter. In the upside-down drawing, he found her touching; she was locked up somewhere and her survival was his responsibility. He felt the dread of failure grip his entrails. He had been unable to save Irène. What would he do now? Would he let her die too?

  From the first step, the first moment of this case, he has been trying to block out the emotions building up behind the wall; now the wall is crumbling, one by one cracks are opening up and sooner or later it will collapse, floor him, overwhelm him, and it’ll be straight back to the morgue, straight back to the square marked “psychiatric clinic”. He looks at what he has been sketching on his pad: a huge rock, a boulder. Portrait of Camille as Sisyphus.

  25

  The post-mortem takes place first thing Wednesday morning. Camille is there. As is Louis.

  Le Guen is late, as usual, and by the time he gets to the mortuary, they already know everything they’re going to know. In all probability, the body is that of Pascal Trarieux. Everything fits: age, height, hair colour, likely date of death, not to mention the fact that Sandrine Bontemps swore she recognised his trainers, despite the fact that there are half a million pairs in circulation. A D.N.A. test will be done to confirm definitively that the body is that of the missing boy, but for now they can assume that it is him and that Nathalie Granger killed him with a blow to the back of the head with something like a pickaxe (all the garden tools found at the house have been brought back for examination) before smashing his head in with a shovel.

  “Which proves she really had a score to settle with the guy,” Camille says.

  “Oh yes, thirty separate blows at least,” the pathologist says. “I’ll be able to give you an exact figure later. A number of the blows were with the edge of the shovel, which is why it looks as though he was attacked with a blunt hatchet.”

  Camille is satisfied. Not happy, but satisfied. The big picture matches up pretty well to what he suspected. If the arsehole magistrate were here, he might make a sarcastic comment, but with his old friend Le Guen he just winks and says in a low voice:

  “I told you there was something not right about her …”

  “We’ll have to run tests, but it’s definitely acid,” the pathologist says.

  The guy had been hit over the head thirty times and then his killer, Nathalie Granger, had poured at least a litre of acid down his throat. From the damage caused, the pathologist speculates that it was concentrated sulphuric acid.

  “Highly concentrated.”

  It’s certainly true that such products cause serious damage. Flesh bubbles and dissolves at a speed directly proportional to the concentration of the acid.

  Camille asks the question that’s been nagging at everyone since they found the body the day before:

  “Was Trarieux still alive when it happened, or was he already dead?”

  He knows the routine answer: we’ll have to wait for the results. But this time the pathologist is forthcoming.

  “To judge by the marks on the remaining tissue, particularly the forearms, the victim would appear to have been tied up.”

  A brief moment of contemplation.

  “You want my opinion?” the pathologist says.

  No-one wants his opinion, which only serves to encourage him.

  “In my opinion, he was struck several times with the shovel, tied up, and then woken up with a couple of pints of acid … Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t finished off with the shovel – when you’ve found the right tool for the job … Anyway, in my humble opinion, the poor bastard really suffered.”

  It’s almost impossible to imagine, but, right now, as far as the detectives are concerned
, the details of the M.O. make no difference. But if the pathologist is right, for the victim, whether the acid came pre- or post-mortem makes a hell of a difference.

  “It’ll matter to the jury, too,” Camille says.

  *

  The problem with Camille is that he never backs down. Never. When he’s got a theory in his head … One day Le Guen said to him: “God, you’re a stubborn fucker! Even a fox terrier knows when to retreat!”

  “A neat comparison,” Camille retorted. “Maybe you’d be better off comparing me to a basset hound. Or hey, how about a toy poodle?”

  Had it been anyone else, it would have ended in a duel.

  So right now, Camille is living up to his reputation for never backing down. Since yesterday, Le Guen thinks he seems anxious, though at other times he seems to be gloating to himself. When they run into each other in the corridors, Camille barely says hello, then two hours later he’s hanging round the divisionnaire’s office as though he can’t bear to leave, as though he has something to say but can’t bring himself to say it, then eventually he does leave, almost reluctantly, giving Le Guen a resentful stare. Le Guen is a patient man. They were coming out of the toilets together (the sight of them standing next to each other at the urinals is priceless), and Le Guen simply said: “Whenever you’re ready,” which translates as “I’ve steeled myself, I can take it.”

  And now comes the moment, out on the terrace just before lunch. Camille has turned off his mobile telephone to indicate that he wants everyone’s undivided attention. All four of them are there: Camille, Le Guen, Armand and Louis. Now that the storm has cleared the skies, the weather is mild again. Armand knocks back his beer almost in a single gulp and, for good measure, quickly orders a packet of crisps and some olives on the tab someone else will wind up paying.