Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

  “Is this her handwriting?”

  “No, it’s mine.”

  “I expected as much.”

  He dictates the address over the telephone and waits. In front of him, above the sideboard is a framed picture of a stag standing in a woodland glade.

  “He looks completely stupid, that stag of yours …”

  “My daughter painted it,” Mme Guénaude says.

  “You’re a menace, the whole lot of you.”

  Mme Guénaude racks her brains. Emma worked for a bank – she can’t remember which one … a foreign bank. No surprise there. Camille continues with his questions though he already knows the answers: in return for asking no questions, Guénaude was taking an extortionate rent; this is the implicit contract when you rent on the black market.

  The address is phony; Camille hangs up.

  Louis arrives with two forensics officers. The landlady feels so weak she can’t go upstairs with them. She hasn’t managed to find a new tenant. They already know what they’ll find in Emma’s apartment: Léa’s fingerprints, Laura’s D.N.A., traces of Nathalie.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Camille says on his way out of the door. “You’ll also be charged as an accessory to murder. That’s murders, plural.”

  Though she’s already sitting down, Gabrielle Guénaude steadies herself with a hand on the coffee table. She is sweating, almost in agony.

  “There is something!” she suddenly shouts after them. “The removal man, I know him.”

  Camille hurries back.

  “Just boxes and flat-pack furniture – she didn’t have much, you understand,” Mme Guénaude says, pursing her lips. They immediately get in touch with the removal company; the secretary isn’t very helpful: no, she simply can’t give out such information without knowing who she’s dealing with.

  “O.K.,” Camille says, “I’ll come and pick up the information in person. But I should warn you, if I have to put myself out, I’ll close the place down for a year, I’ll slap you with a tax inspection that goes back to your first year in kindergarten, and you I personally will throw into prison for obstruction of justice, and if you’ve got kids, they’ll be taken into care by social services.”

  Though it’s a ridiculous bluff, it works: the secretary becomes flustered, gives the address of the storage unit where the girl left her stuff and her name: Emma Szekely.

  Camille has her spell it.

  “Beginning S, Z, right? O.K., I want no-one opening that lockup, you got me? No-one. Is that clear?”

  The place is ten minutes away. Camille hangs up and screams upstairs:

  “I need a team, right now!”

  He runs into the stairwell.

  41

  As a precaution, Alex takes the stairwell down to the car park. Her Clio starts first time. The car is cold. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror. She looks seriously tired; she runs her finger under each eye, gives herself a smile that turns into a grimace. She pokes out her tongue, then drives to the exit.

  But she’s not out of the woods quite yet. At the top of the ramp, she inserts her swipe card, the red and white barrier rises and she slams on the brakes. Standing in front of her is a policeman. He raises one arm, signalling her to stop, then he turns round, holding his arm out horizontally to stress that there’s no exit. Outside, a succession of unmarked cars drive past, sirens wailing.

  In the second car, a bald guy who can barely see out of the side window. It’s like a presidential cortège. Once they’re gone, the officer waves her on. She turns right. She moves off a little abruptly, and in the boot, the two small boxes labelled PERSONAL rattle, but Alex is not alarmed – the bottles of acid are safely stowed. There is no risk.

  42

  Almost 10.00 p.m. It’s a fiasco. It’s been a struggle, but Camille is calm again. As long as he doesn’t think about the laughing face of the caretaker at the storage depot, an anaemic idiot in grubby Coke-bottle glasses who can’t see the blindingly obvious.

  As for communication: the girl – what girl? The car – what car? The boxes – what boxes? They open the lock-up she rented and their hearts skip a beat: it’s all still there, ten taped-up boxes, the girl’s things, her personal belongings. They pounce on them. Camille wants to tear everything open right now. But they have to follow procedure – everything has to be inventoried, which is speeded up by a call to the magistrate. They carry everything away: the boxes, the flat-pack furniture. When all’s said and done, it’s not much, but they’re hopeful they’ll find personal effects, an indication of her true identity. For the investigation, this is the moment of truth.

  The faint hope of getting something from the C.C.T.V. cameras placed on every level doesn’t last long. It’s not a matter of how long they keep the tapes; they’re dummy cameras.

  “You could say they’re just for decoration,” the supervisor says, laughing.

  *

  It takes all night to draw up the inventory and for forensics to take essential samples and prints. First they deal with the furniture, run-of-the-mill stuff you could buy anywhere: bookshelves, a kitchen table, a bed, a mattress – the techs went to town on it with their cotton swabs and tweezers. After that, the contents of the boxes are catalogued. Sportswear, beachwear, summer clothes, winter clothes.

  “This is all chainstore stuff you could buy anywhere in the world,” Louis says.

  Books, almost two boxes full, all paperbacks: Céline, Proust, Gide, Dostoievsky, Rimbaud. Camille scans the titles: Journey to the End of the Night, Swann in Love, The Counterfeiters. Louis meanwhile looks pensive.

  “What is it?” Camille says.

  Louis doesn’t answer straight away. Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Lily of the Valley, The Red and the Black, The Great Gatsby, L’Étranger.

  “It’s like a schoolgirl’s reading list.”

  He’s right. The choices seem studied, representative. All the books have obviously been read and reread – some are literally falling to pieces. Whole passages are underlined, sometimes right up to the last page. In the margins there are exclamation marks, question marks, large crosses, small crosses, mostly in blue ballpoint; in some places the ink has almost bled through.

  “She reads what she’s supposed to read – she wants to be a good girl; she’s diligent.” Camille raises the stakes. “Emotionally immature?”

  “I don’t know. Regression, maybe.”

  Camille doesn’t always understand what Louis says, but he gets the nub of it. The girl’s not all there.

  “She seems to have a little Italian and a little English. There’s a handful of foreign classics that she’s started but hasn’t finished.”

  Camille spotted this too. The copies of I promessi sposi, L’amante senza fissa dimora, Il nome della rosa, and Alice in Wonderland, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Portrait of a Lady and Emma are all in the original language.

  “The girl in the Maciak case … someone mentioned a foreign accent, didn’t they?”

  A sheaf of tourist brochures confirm their theory.

  “She’s not dumb, our girl – she’s studied, and she speaks a couple of languages – not fluently, certainly, but it implies she went abroad on language courses … can you see her with Pascal Trarieux?

  “Or seducing Stefan Maciak?”

  “Or murdering Jacqueline Zanetti?”

  Louis makes rapid notes. From the printouts they’ve got, he might be able to reconstruct the girl’s itinerary, in part at least – some of the travel agency brochures have got dates; it should be possible to piece things together, but they’re still no closer to a name. There are no formal documents. Not a single identifiable trace. In what kind of life does a girl possess so little?

  By the end of the night, the conclusion is blindingly obvious.

  “She’s cleared things out, left nothing personal. Just in case the police found her stuff. There’s nothing here that will help us.”

  Both men get to their feet, Camille slips on his jacket. Louis hesitates – he’d be happy to
stay longer, rummage, go through things …

  “Let it go, Louis,” Camille says. “She’s already got a serious rap sheet behind her, and looking at the way she works, I reckon she’s got one ahead of her.”

  *

  This is also Le Guen’s opinion.

  It’s Saturday, early evening, Quai de Valmy.

  Le Guen phoned Camille and now the two men are sitting on the terrace of La Marine. Maybe it’s the canal, the water evoking thoughts of fish, but they’ve ordered two glasses of dry white wine. Le Guen sat down carefully; he’s come across many chairs that wouldn’t take his weight. This one is up to the job.

  This is the norm when they talk outside the office: they chat about everything and nothing and only get round to talking shop in the last few minutes, never more than a few sentences.

  It is plain that what’s been preying on Camille’s mind all day is the auction. Tomorrow morning.

  “You’re not keeping anything?”

  “No, I’m selling it all,” Camille says. “I’m giving it all away.”

  “I thought you were selling it?”

  “I’m selling the paintings. I’m giving away the money. Done and dusted.”

  Camille doesn’t know when he made this decision – he just blurted it out – but he knows it’s the result of much thought. Le Guen is about to say something, stops himself, but he can’t help it.

  “To whom?”

  This, on the other hand, Camille has given no thought to. He wants to give away the money, but he has no idea to whom.

  43

  “Is this thing speeding up or am I imagining it?”

  “No, this is how it usually plays out,” Camille says. “You just need to get used to it.”

  He says it casually, but in fact things have taken a serious turn for the worse. The body of Félix Manière has been discovered in his apartment. A colleague from work gave the alert when he didn’t show up for a “crucial meeting” he himself had scheduled. He was found dead as dead, his head hanging off the torso, the whole neck melted away with sulphuric acid. The case was immediately referred to Commandant Verhœven who, by the end of the day, had been summoned by the magistrate. This is serious.

  It’s quickly dealt with. The call log on the victim’s mobile phone reveals that the last call, received on the night of his death, was from a hotel on rue Monge. They check and it turns out this is where the girl stayed when she got back from Toulouse. She arranged to have dinner with him that evening. This is what he told one of his colleagues when he left work.

  Though the hair and the eyes are different, the receptionist at the hotel on the rue Monge positively identifies her as the girl in the E-FIT. The girl was gone the following morning. Checked in under a false name. Paid in cash.

  “The kid, this Félix – who is he?” Le Guen says and, without waiting for an answer, flicks through Camille’s report. “Forty-four …”

  “That’s right,” Camille confirms. “I.T. support for a computer company. Separated, divorce in the works. Definitely alcoholic.”

  Le Guen says nothing – he’s rapidly skimming through the report, making an occasional hmm that sounds like a whimper. People have whimpered over less.

  “So what’s the story with the laptop?”

  “Vanished. But I can assure you stealing the laptop wasn’t the reason she hit him over the head with a statuette and poured half a litre of acid down his gullet.”

  “The girl?”

  “Unquestionably. Maybe they’d been in touch via e-mail. Or maybe she used his computer and didn’t want us to see what she’d been up to.”

  “O.K. So?”

  Le Guen is angry – something that’s not his style. The national media, which scarcely turned a hair at the death of Jacqueline Zanetti (the murder of a hotelier in Toulouse is a bit, well, provincial), has finally been roused to indignation. The crime scene in Saint-Denis is a little downmarket, but the extra touch of using acid to finish off the victim is interesting. It’s just another murder, but the technique is original, almost exotic. Right now, there are two victims. Practically a serial killer, but not quite. So in the meantime, it makes the news, but no-one’s terribly excited. A third victim and the media would be celebrating. The case would be the lead item on the 8 o’clock news, Le Guen would be summoned to the top floor of the Ministry for the Interior, Vidard the magistrate to the Ministry of Justice, and it would all kick off like the Battle of Gravelotte. No-one dares contemplate what would happen if the murders in Reims and Étampes were leaked to the press … The media would mock up a map of France (more or less like the one in Camille’s office) scattered with little coloured pins, with deeply moving biographies of the victims and the promise of a murderous road movie “à la française”. Joy. Jubilation.

  For the moment, Le Guen has only had to deal with “serious downward pressure” – it could be worse, but it’s a headache. Le Guen is a good boss when it comes to dealing with his superiors; he keeps all that to himself. They only get to see the overflow; but today, it seems to be overflowing everywhere.

  “You getting shit from upstairs?”

  Le Guen is thunderstruck by the question.

  “Camille, what could possibly make you think that … ?”

  This is the problem with couples: the scenes are a little repetitive.

  “I mean, we’ve got a girl who’s abducted and locked up with a pack of rats, a kidnapper who tops himself and takes a section of the Périphérique to a standstill for half the night …”

  This scene, for example, is one that Camille and Le Guen have played out at least fifty times.

  “… the abducted girl escapes before we can find her, we discover she’s already bumped off three guys using sulphuric acid …”

  Camille always thinks it smacks of a cheap farce – he’s about to say as much, but Le Guen ploughs on.

  “… by the time we’ve got a case file together, she’s despatched some old biddy in Toulouse to hoteliers’ heaven, come back to Paris …”

  Camille waits for the predictable conclusion.

  “… where she’s whacked some guy who probably just wanted to get his leg over, and you’re asking me whether …”

  “… they’re giving you shit upstairs?” Camille concludes for him, firmly put in his place.

  Camille is already on his feet, already at the door. He opens it wearily.

  “Where are you off to?” Le Guen bellows.

  “If I’m going to have someone read me the riot act, I’d rather it was Vidard.”

  “Honestly, you’ve got no taste.”

  44

  Alex let the first two lorries drive past, and the third. From where she’s parked, she can clearly watch the movements of the articulated lorries lined up next to the loading bay. For the past two hours the fork-lift operators have been loading them with pallets high as houses.

  She came here the night before to check the place out. She had to scale the wall. It wasn’t easy; it meant climbing on the roof of her car. If she’d been spotted, it would have all been over. But no, she was able to perch on top of the wall for a few minutes. Every vehicle has a sign with the order number stencilled next to the top right of the destination. They’re all heading for Germany: Cologne, Frankfurt, Hanover, Bremen, Dortmund. She needs the one that’s going to Munich. She jotted down the licence plate, the order number, but it hardly matters: seen from the front, the truck is unmissable. Across the top of the windscreen is a sticker reading BOBBY. She hopped down from the wall when she heard the guard dog, which had obviously caught her scent.

  Half an hour ago, she spotted the driver climb into his cab to stash his stuff, pick up his paperwork. He’s a tall, lean guy in blue overalls with cropped hair and a moustache like a scrubbing brush. It doesn’t matter what he looks like – what matters is that he picks her up. She slept in her car until the place opened at about 4.00 a.m. The hustle and bustle started about half an hour ago and it hasn’t stopped since. Alex is nervous; she can’t aff
ord to miss her cue, because if she does, she’s got no plan. Her only option is – what? To sit in a hotel room and wait for the police to arrive?

  Eventually, just before 6.00, the guy goes over to his lorry, which has been idling for at least fifteen minutes, checks his paperwork. Alex watches him joking with a fork-lift operator and a couple of other drivers then, at last, he climbs into his cab. This is when she gets out of her car, walks round the back, opens the boot, takes out her rucksack, checks from behind the open boot that no other lorry pulls out in front of the one she needs, and when she’s sure, she runs to the vehicle exit.

  *

  “I never hitchhike on the road. Too dangerous.”

  Bobby nods. For a girl, it wouldn’t be a good idea. He admires her resourcefulness; waiting at the gate of a haulage company rather than sticking her thumb out on the autoroute.

  “But with all the trucks you guys have got, there’s bound to be someone who’ll take you.”

  Bobby is astonished by the shrewdness of Alex’s technique. Though she’s not Alex. To him, she’s Chloë.

  “I’m Robert,” he says, reaching across the seat to shake her hand. “But everyone calls me Bobby,” he points to the sticker.

  Still, he’s surprised that she’s hitchhiking at all.

  “Plane tickets are so cheap these days. Apparently you can get flights on the net for forty euros. Fair enough, it’s always at some ungodly hour, but if your time’s your own …”