Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

They piece together the story, the details of which are worryingly scant. Where did Gattegno meet Nathalie Granger? No-one knows. Not even the mechanics Louis talks to, the ones working there two years ago. “She was a looker,” one of them says – he met her one day while she was waiting on the corner in her car. Only ever saw her once, couldn’t say whether it’s the girl in the E-FIT. On the other hand, he can remember the make, the model number and the year of the car (he’s a garage mechanic), not that that will be much use to them. “Hazel eyes,” chips in a man nearing retirement age – he’s obviously stopped checking out women’s asses and big tits don’t do much for him any more, so he looks at their eyes. But when it comes to the E-FIT, he couldn’t swear to it. What’s the point of being observant, Camille wonders, when your memory’s shot to fuck?

  No, no-one knows how they met. But they’re all agreed it was a whirlwind romance. Totally besotted, “from one day to the next” the boss was a changed man.

  “She obviously knew a thing or two,” says a guy who clearly thinks it’s funny to talk dirty about his former boss.

  Gattegno started ducking out of the garage. Mme Joris admits that she followed him once – she was going out of her mind on account of the children; they managed to give her the slip, the husband didn’t come home that night, showed up all sheepish the next morning, but Léa came looking for him. “She showed up at our house!” wails Mme Joris. Two years later it still chokes her up. She saw Léa through the window. On the one hand there was his wife – the children were away (“a pity, because that might have stopped him”), on the other, standing at the garden gate, “that slut” (Nathalie Granger, a.k.a. Léa, clearly has a reputation). Anyway, the husband hesitates, though not for long, then grabs his wallet and his jacket and is gone. He was found dead in a room in a Formule 1 motel the following Monday; the chambermaids discovered the body. In a Formule 1, there’s no lobby, no receptionist, no visible staff. To get your room key you put a credit card in a machine – they used the husband’s card. There was no sign of the girl. At the morgue, they wouldn’t let her see the lower part of her husband’s face – it can’t have been a pretty sight. The post-mortem was conclusive: no signs of a struggle, the guy lay on the bed fully clothed “shoes and all”, and swallowed half a litre of acid: “the kind used in car batteries”.

  Back at the brigade, while Louis is typing up the report (he types quickly, using all his fingers, carefully, regularly, as though he’s practising scales on a piano), Camille checks the autopsy report, but it says nothing about the concentration of the acid. A brutal, barbarous suicide – the guy must really have been at the end of his rope. The girl just left him there. Nor was there any sign of the 4,000 euros the garage owner withdrew the night before – using three separate cards “including the company credit card”.

  There can be no doubt: Gattegno and Trarieux had the same fatal encounter with Nathalie-Léa; the amounts stolen in both cases were grotesquely small. They start combing through Trarieux’s past, Gattegno’s past, searching for common ground.

  30

  Her body starts to come back to life, tired and battered but intact. The infections have cleared up, most of the cuts have healed, the bruises are fading.

  She’s been to see Mme Guénaude to explain things: “a family emergency”. She had carefully chosen make-up that said “I might be young, but I’ve got a sense of duty”.

  “I don’t know … we’ll have to see …”

  All this struck Mme Guénaude as a little sudden, but Mme Guénaude knows the value of money. She used to be a shopkeeper. And since Alex was offering to pay two months’ rent cash up front, she said she understood. She even said, “Obviously if I find another tenant before that, I’ll pay you back …”

  You lying cow, Alex thought, but said simply, “That’s very kind,” and smiled gratefully, careful not to overdo it – after all, the reason for her sudden departure is supposed to be grave.

  She paid the rent, left a fake forwarding address. If the worst comes to the worst and Mme Guénaude does write to her, she’s hardly going to put herself out when the letter and the cheque are returned unopened; after all, it would be to her advantage.

  “About the inventory.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” says the landlady, knowing she’s got a good deal. “I’m sure everything’s in order.”

  Alex says she will leave the keys in the mailbox.

  There’s no problem about the car; she pays for the parking space on the rue des Morillons by standing order so she doesn’t have to worry about it. It’s a six-year-old Renault Clio she bought second hand.

  She brought up the cardboard boxes from the basement, twelve of them, dismantled the furniture that belongs to her: the pine table, the three bookcases, the bed. She doesn’t know why she’s bothering to hang on to all this stuff – apart from the bed, she loves her bed; it’s almost sacred. When it’s all disassembled, she looks at it doubtfully; a whole life takes up less room than you might think. At least hers does. Two cubic metres. Three according to the removal man. Alex just agreed with him – she knows what removal men are like. A white van. No point sending two guys; one will be enough. She also agrees to the price of storage, and the extra charge for next-day service. When Alex decides to leave, she wants to leave straight away. Her mother is always saying: “With you, everything always has to be done yesterday – it’s no wonder it never gets done properly.” Sometimes, when she’s on particularly good form, her mother adds, “Your brother, now that’s a different matter …” These days the areas where her brother outshines her are few and far between. But for Alex’s mother, there will always be enough; it’s a matter of principle.

  Despite the pain and the tiredness, within a few hours Alex has finished packing. She has even managed to throw out a lot of things. She regularly empties her bookshelves of all but a handful of classics. When she moved out of Porte de Clignancourt, she tossed out everything by Karen Blixen and E. M. Forster; when she left her place on the rue de Commerce, it was Stefan Zweig and Pirandello. When she left Champigny it was Duras. She gets these crazes: when she likes an author, she reads everything (her mother claims she has no sense of proportion), but then when she wants to move, the books weigh a ton.

  The rest of the time she lives out of boxes, sleeps on a mattress on the floor. There are two small boxes marked PERSONAL containing the few things that are really precious to her. Most of the stuff is silly, insignificant: exercise books from school, report cards, letters, postcards, a diary she’s been keeping on and off – never for very long – since she was twelve or thirteen, notes from old friends, trinkets that, thinking about it, she could have thrown out years ago, and she will do one of these days. She knows how childish they are. There’s costume jewellery, too, dried-up old fountain pens, hair clips she used to like, holiday photographs, snapshots with her mother and brother when she was little. It all needs to be chucked out; it’s worse than useless, it’s dangerous to hang on to it – old cinema tickets, pages torn from novels … One day she’ll throw it all out. Right now, the two boxes marked PERSONAL have pride of place in this hasty move.

  When it was all done, Alex went out to a movie, to dinner at Chartier and to buy some battery acid. She has a mask and a pair of protective goggles she wears when she’s doing prep. work; she turns on the fan and the extractor hood, and keeps the window wide open to get rid of the fumes. To distil it to an 80 per cent concentration, it has to be heated slowly until it begins to give off fumes. She makes up twelve half-litres. She stores it in bottles made of corrosion-resistant plastic she bought in a hardware shop near République. She keeps two of them and places the others carefully in a compartmented bag.

  At night, her legs spasm and she wakes with a jolt; it could be nightmares – she has a lot of those, dreams where rats are eating her alive, where Trarieux is boring steel rods into her head with his electric drill. She’s also haunted by the face of Trarieux’s son. She can picture his moronic face, rats pouring out of his
mouth. Sometimes the scenes are real: Pascal Trarieux sitting in the deckchair in the garden in Champigny as she comes up behind him, raising the shovel over her head, hampered by her blouse, which is too tight at the sleeves. At the time she weighed two stone more than she does now. God did she have tits … The fuckwit was obsessed with them. She’d let him get under her blouse, never for long, and when he was really horny, when his hands started to squeeze her breasts excitedly, she’d give him a sharp slap, just like a schoolteacher. Though on a very different scale, it’s not so different from the rap she gave him on the back of his skull, swinging the shovel with every ounce of her strength. In her dream, the shovel blow is terribly loud and, as she did in real life, she feels the vibrations travel up her arms to her shoulders. Pascal Trarieux, half-unconscious, turns to her with difficulty, reels, gives her a look of astonishment, of disbelief, a strangely serene look in which there is no room for doubt. So with her shovel Alex makes room for doubt: seven blows, eight, Trarieux’s head has slumped onto the garden table, which makes the work easier. After that, the dream skips the part about tying him up and jumps straight to the part when she pours the first dose of acid into Pascal’s mouth. The stupid fucker screams so loudly he’ll wake the whole neighbourhood so she’s forced to stand up and whack him in the face with the flat of the shovel. It’s amazing the noise those things make.

  There are the dreams, the nightmares, the aches, the cramps, the painful spasms, but slowly her body is recovering. Alex knows that it will never entirely go away – it’s impossible to survive a week in a tiny cage with a colony of frenzied rats without owing a debt to life. She does lots of exercises, stretching exercises she learned long ago, and she’s started jogging again too. She goes out early in the morning and does several laps of the parc George-Brassens, but she has to stop regularly because she tires easily.

  *

  Finally the removal man comes and takes everything away. He’s a big guy and a bit of a braggart; he tries to flirt with her – she’s seen it all before.

  Alex goes and buys a train ticket to Toulouse, puts her suitcase in the left luggage office and checks her watch as she leaves the Gare Montparnasse: 8.30 p.m. She could go back to the Restaurant Mont-Tonnerre; maybe he’ll be there, him and his friends, telling stories and living it up … From what she overheard, they go on a lads’ night out every week. Though maybe they don’t always go to the same restaurant.

  But it turns out that they do, because here he is with his mates – there are more than there were before; it’s become a little club. Tonight there are seven of them. Alex has the impression the owner is serving them a little disapprovingly – he’s clearly not convinced that this little club is to his liking: too much noise, and other diners turn to stare. The pretty red-haired woman … All the staff wait on her hand and foot. The table where they’ve seated Alex makes it more difficult to see him than it was last time – she has to lean and, unluckily, he notices, his eyes meet hers, and it’s obvious he was the one she was looking at. Oh well, she thinks, smiling. She has a glass of chilled Riesling, scallops with steamed vegetables al dente followed by crème brûlée and an espresso, then another coffee, the second one compliments of the owner, who apologises for the noise. He even offers her a glass of chartreuse – he thinks of it as a girl’s drink. Alex says, “No, thank you, but I’d love a Baileys on the rocks.” The owner smiles; he finds the girl perfectly charming. She takes her time leaving, “forgets” her book and comes back for it. The guy is no longer with his friends, he’s on his feet, slipping on his coat, his mates making crude jokes about his sudden departure. He is right behind her as she emerges from the restaurant, and she can feel his eyes on her arse; Alex has a fine arse, as sensitive as a satellite dish. Hardly has she walked thirty feet than he’s there beside her. He says “Hi”, and something about his face stirs conflicting feelings in her.

  Félix. He doesn’t tell her his surname. She immediately notices he’s not wearing a wedding ring, but there’s a white band around his finger – he’s probably just taken it off.

  “What about you, what’s your name?”

  “Julia,” Alex says.

  “Pretty name.”

  He would have said this regardless. Alex finds it funny.

  He jerks his thumb back towards the restaurant.

  “We were a bit rowdy …”

  “A bit,” Alex says, smiling.

  “It’s a boys’ night out, so …”

  Alex doesn’t respond. If he carries on, he’ll just dig himself in deeper, and he realises this. He suggests a drink at a bar he knows. She says no thank you. They stroll a little way together. Alex walks slowly, takes a better look at him. He’s wearing cheap chainstore clothes and, though he’s just had dinner, that’s not the only reason his shirt buttons are straining; he has no-one to tell him he needs to buy the next size up. Or go on a diet and take up a sport.

  “No, honestly,” he says, “it’s just twenty minutes …”

  He’s just mentioned that his place is not far, they could have a drink there. Alex says she’s tired, not really in the mood. They’ve reached his car, an Audi piled with junk.

  “So what do you do for a living?” she says.

  “Technical maintenance operative.”

  Alex translates: repair man.

  “Scanners, printers, hard drives …” he explains, as though somehow this makes him seem more important. Then he adds, “I’ve got a team of—”

  Suddenly he realises it’s stupid to try and big himself up. Worse, it’s counterproductive.

  He waves his hand. Difficult to tell if he’s brushing away the end of the sentence as though it’s unimportant, or the beginning as though he regrets saying it.

  He opens the car door; there’s a cold blast of stale cigarette smoke.

  “Do you smoke?”

  This is Alex’s technique – she blows hot and cold. She’s a past master.

  “A little,” says the guy, embarrassed.

  He’s about six foot, quite broad-shouldered with light-brown hair and dark, almost black eyes. Walking next to her, she notices he’s got stubby legs. He’s not very well proportioned.

  “I only smoke when I’m around smokers,” he says, ever the gentleman.

  She is convinced that right now he would give anything for a cigarette. He finds her really attractive, he’s being very formal, but he can’t bring himself to look her in the eyes because he’s so turned on. It’s intensely sexual, animal; it makes him completely blind. He would be incapable of telling what she’s wearing. He gives the impression that if Alex doesn’t sleep with him right now, he’ll go home and murder his whole family with a hunting rifle.

  “Are you married?”

  “No … divorced. Well, separated.”

  Simply from the tone of his voice, Alex translates, “I don’t know what to say – I’m getting ripped apart here.”

  “What about you?”

  “Single.”

  This is the good thing about the truth; it rings true. He looks down, not out of embarrassment or modesty – he’s staring at her breasts. Whatever Alex decides to wear, the first thing everyone notices is her beautiful, voluptuous breasts.

  She smiles and, as she leaves, she says,

  “Some other time, maybe …”

  He jumps at this: when, when? He fumbles in his pockets. A taxi passes. Alex hails it. The taxi pulls up. Alex opens the door. When she turns to say goodbye, he’s holding out his business card. It’s a little crumpled; it looks shoddy. She takes it all the same and, just to show how little it matters, slips it absent-mindedly into her pocket. In the rear-view mirror, she sees him, standing in the middle of the street, watching the taxi drive away.

  31

  The gendarme asked whether his presence was required.

  “I’d rather you stayed …” Camille said, “assuming you can spare the time, obviously.”

  In general, collaboration between the national police force and the local police of the gend
armerie can be a little fractious, but Camille has a lot of time for regional officers. He feels he has a lot in common with them. They tend to be opinionated, pugnacious, the sort who never give up on a lead, even a cold one. The local officer is clearly flattered by Camille’s suggestion – he’s a chief sergeant, but Camille refers to him as “chef” because he knows the form; the officer feels respected and he’s right. He’s forty years old and has a pencil-thin moustache, like a nineteenth-century musketeer. There’s a lot about him that’s old-fashioned – a self-conscious elegance, a stiff formality, but Camille quickly recognises that the man is really intelligent. He has a high regard for his position. His shoes are polished mirrors.

  The weather is grey, maritime.

  Faignoy-lès-Reims, population 800, two streets, a square with a vast war memorial; the place is as gloomy as a wet Sunday in paradise. They head for the bistro – this is why they’ve come here. Chief Langlois parks the squad car right outside.

  As they go in, the smell of soup, cheap wine and detergent hits you in the back of the throat. Camille starts to wonder if he’s becoming hypersensitive to smell. Back at the garage, Mme Joris and her vanilla perfume …

  Stefan Maciak died in November 2005. The new owner arrived shortly afterwards.

  “Actually, I took over the place in January.”

  All he knows is what he’s been told, what everyone knows. It even meant he dithered about whether to take the place over, because the story was big news in the area. You get burglaries, hold-ups, that kind of thing round here – even murders from time to time (the bar owner tries in vain to get Chief Langlois to back him up), but something like this … Actually, Camille hasn’t come here to listen, he’s come to see the crime scene, to get a feel for the story, to clarify his thoughts. At the time, Maciak is fifty-seven, he’s of Polish descent, single. He’s a big man, about as alcoholic as you can be when you’ve been managing bars for thirty years with no self-discipline. Not much is known about his life outside his workplace. As for sex, he paid regular visits to the local knocking shop – Germaine Malignier and her daughter, known to regulars as “the four cheeks”. Otherwise he seemed a decent enough sort of guy.