Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

  It was around this time that Thomas Vasseur began to visit her bedroom at night. A little before, a little afterwards, it hardly matters. Because the next set of pictures are not much more encouraging. They show Alex at thirteen. Group and family photographs. Alex stands on the right, her mother in the middle, Thomas on the left. They were taken on the patio of a suburban house. A birthday party. “At my late brother’s place,” says Mme Prévost, quickly making the sign of the cross. A simple gesture can sometimes open up new perspectives. The Prévost family are plainly religious, or were religious – or at least they pay lip service. Camille feels this does not bode well for the girl. In the picture, Alex has grown a little, but only in height. She is still skinny, gangling; she looks awkward and uncomfortable in her own skin. She makes you want to protect her. In the groups she is standing slightly behind the others. On the back of the print, Alex has written: THE QUEEN MOTHER. Mme Prévost does not look particularly regal, more like a charwoman in her Sunday best. She is turned towards her son and smiling.

  *

  “Robert Praderie.”

  Armand has taken over. He notes the answers with a new biro on a brand new notepad. This is a big day at the criminelle.

  “Never heard of him. This is one of Alex’s victims, right?”

  “Yes,” Armand says. “He was a lorry driver. His body was found in the cab of his truck at an autoroute service station near the German border. Alex drove a screwdriver into his eye and another into his throat then poured half a litre of sulphuric acid into his mouth.”

  Vasseur is thinking.

  “Alex always was vitriolic …”

  Armand does not smile. This is his strength; he pretends not to understand or not to care – in fact, he’s completely focused.

  “Probably so …” he says. “She certainly had a temper from what I can tell.”

  “Women …”

  Implication: you know what women are like. Vasseur is the kind of guy who says something lewd and looks around for support. It’s the sort of thing you expect from ageing Lotharios, the dickless wonders, the perverts, but in fact it’s all too common among men of all sorts.

  “So, this Robert Praderie,” Armand goes on. “His name means nothing to you?”

  “Nothing – why, should it?”

  Armand does not respond; he rummages in the case file.

  “What about Bernard Gattegno?”

  “Are you planning to go through them one by one?”

  “There are only six; it won’t take long.”

  “How is any of this connected to me?”

  “It’s connected to you because you did know Bernard Gattegno.”

  “I’d be surprised.”

  “Oh, but you did … cast your mind back. Gattegno was a garage owner in Étampes. You bought a motorbike from him in, let me see,” he checks the file, “… in 1988.”

  Vasseur considers for a moment, then nods.

  “Maybe. It’s a long time ago. I was nineteen in 1988; how do you expect me to remember?”

  “And yet …”

  Armand leafs through the loose pages in the folder.

  “Here we go. We have a witness statement from a friend of Monsieur Gattegno who seems to remember you very well. You were both big motorbike fanatics back then. You used to go out riding together.”

  “When?”

  “In 1988 and ’89.”

  “I suppose you remember all the people you used to know in 1988?”

  “No, but I’m not the one answering the questions, you are.”

  Vasseur gives him a weary look.

  “O.K., fine, maybe I did go on bike rides with this guy twenty years ago. So?”

  “So, it’s a link in a chain. You didn’t know Monsieur Praderie, but you knew Monsieur Gattegno and he did know Monsieur Praderie.”

  “Show me two people who have no connection whatever to each other.”

  Armand tries and fails to come up with a clever retort. He turns to Louis.

  “Frigyes Karinthy’s six degrees of separation?” Louis says. “Yes, we’re familiar with the theory; it’s very seductive. But I fear we may be straying from the point of the interview.”

  *

  Mademoiselle Toubiana is sixty-six and fit as a fiddle. She stresses the word “mademoiselle”, proudly asserts her spinster-hood. Camille met her two days ago. She was just coming out of the local swimming pool and they had a chat in a café opposite; her damp hair had a lot of grey. She’s the sort of woman who enjoys growing old because it emphasises her energy. Given her age, she sometimes confuses her former pupils. She laughs. When she runs into parents who talk to her about their children, she pretends to be interested. Not only does she not remember, but she couldn’t care less. “I should be ashamed,” she comments. But she remembers Alex better than many of the girls she taught – she recognises her in the photographs, that shocking thinness.

  “A charming child, always in and out of my office. She would often come to see me at break time; we got along well together.”

  Not that Alex talked much, but she did have friends. What was striking about her was her seriousness. “Out of the blue she could suddenly become deathly serious,” then a minute later she’d be chatting away again. “It was like she was absent for a moment, as though she fell into a sort of hole – it was most peculiar.” When she was in trouble, she would stammer a little. Mlle Toubiana refers to it as “fumbling her words”.

  “I didn’t notice it at first. It’s rare, because usually I have an eye for these things.”

  “Maybe it only started in the middle of the school year.”

  This is what Mlle Toubiana thinks; she nods. Camille tells her she’ll catch ’flu sitting around with damp hair. She tells him that it doesn’t matter, that she catches a cold every autumn. “It’s like a vaccine – it keeps me healthy the rest of the year.”

  “So what do you think might have happened during the year to cause it?”

  She doesn’t know. She shakes her head, staring at the enigma in the picture; she has no words, no idea – the little girl who until then she had felt was so close has drifted away.

  “Did you ever mention the stammer to her mother? Suggest a speech therapist?”

  “I thought she’d grow out of it.”

  Camille observes this ageing woman intently. She’s got character. Not the kind to have no answer to suggest to such a question. Something rings false, but he doesn’t know what.

  “The brother, Thomas, did he pick her up from school?”

  “Oh yes, all the time.”

  This tallies with what the mother said: “Her brother always looked out for Alex.” A tall boy – “a handsome boy,” Mlle Toubiana remembers him well. Camille doesn’t smile. Thomas was studying at the local vocational school.

  “Was she happy that he came to collect her?”

  “No, of course not. What do you expect? Little girls always want to be grown-up; she wanted to walk to school and walk home on her own, or with her friends. Her brother was an adult, you understand …”

  Camille takes the plunge:

  “Alex was raped by her brother; it started the year she was in your class.”

  He lets the words sink in. There is no explosion. Mlle Toubiana is looking elsewhere, at the café counter, the terrace, the street, as though she’s waiting for someone.

  “Did Alex try to talk to you about it?”

  Mlle Toubiana sweeps the question aside with the back of her hand.

  “Yes, maybe, but if we listened to everything the kids tell us … Besides, it was a family matter; it was no concern of mine.”

  *

  “So Trarieux, Gattegno, Praderie …”

  Armand seems satisfied.

  “Good …”

  He shuffles some papers.

  “Ah, Stefan Maciak. I suppose you didn’t know him either?”

  Vasseur says nothing. He’s clearly waiting to see how things pan out.

  “A café over in Reims …” Armand
prompts.

  “Never set foot in Reims.”

  “Before that, he had a café in Épinay-sur-Orge. According to the records of your employer, Distrifair, he was on your route between 1987 and 1990; you leased him two pinball machines.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s certain, Monsieur Vasseur, absolutely certain.”

  Vasseur changes tack. He checks his watch, seems to make a quick calculation, then leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his stomach, ready to wait things out for hours if need be.

  “If you want to tell me what you’re getting at, maybe I can help you.”

  *

  1989. The photograph is of a house in Normandy, between Étretat and Saint-Valery, a mansion of brick and stone with a slate roof and a sweeping front lawn with a hammock and an orchard; here the whole family are gathered – the Leroy family. The father would say to people “Leroy, all one word”, as though there might be any doubt. He had extravagant tastes. He’d made his fortune from a chain of D.I.Y. shops; he had bought the house from a family engaged in a bitter inheritance dispute and thereafter considered himself lord of the manor. He held great barbecues, sent out invitations to staff which had the air of a summons. He had his eye on a seat on the town council, dreamed of getting into politics because it would look good on his business card.

  He called his daughter Reinette – “little queen” – a truly idiotic name to inflict on a girl; the man was capable of anything. Indeed Reinette speaks harshly of her father. She is the one who tells Camille the story; he hadn’t asked her anything.

  She is in the photograph with Alex, the two girls hugging and laughing. The picture was taken by her father at some point during a sunny weekend. The day is hot. Behind the girls, the spray from a lawn-sprinkler traces a fan shape in the sunlight. The shot is badly framed. M. Leroy clearly was not a gifted photographer. His only talent was for business.

  The interview takes place at the Paris offices of R.L. Productions just off the avenue Montaigne. These days, she calls herself “Reine” rather than “Reinette”, oblivious to the fact that this makes her even more like her father. She’s a T.V. producer. When her father died, she sold the Normandy house and used the money to set up her own production company. She receives Camille in a living room which is also used as a conference room. Busy bright young people dash around clearly convinced of the importance of their work.

  One look at the deep plush sofas and Camille decides not to sit down. He stands for the interview. He says nothing, simply shows her the photograph. On the back, Alex wrote: “My beloved Reinette, the queen of my heart.” It’s written in a child’s hand in purple ink with lots of curlicues. The fountain pen they discovered among Alex’s effects had an empty purple ink cartridge inside, and they also found a cheap purple ballpoint – it was clearly a fashionable colour at the time, or perhaps, like many of Alex’s effects, an attempt at being quirky.

  At the time of the picture, the girls were in quatrième at school. Reinette had been held back a year, so though they were in the same class, Reinette was almost fifteen, two years older than Alex. In the photograph, she could be a Ukrainian girl, her hair in fine, tight braids pulled back on her head. Looking at it now, she sighs.

  “My God, we looked daft …”

  Reinette and Alex had been great friends, the way girls can be at those ages.

  “We were inseparable. We’d be together all day and when we got home in the evening we spent hours on the telephone. Our parents used to forbid us to use it.”

  Camille asks questions. Reinette is good at banter. She’s not the type to be intimidated.

  “What about Thomas?”

  Camille is sick and tired of this whole story. The longer it goes on, the more wearisome it feels.

  “He started raping his sister in 1986,” he says.

  Reinette lights a cigarette.

  “You were friends at the time; did she say anything to you about it?”

  “Yes.”

  The response is definite. As if to say, I know what you’re getting at, let’s not take all day about it.

  “Yes … what?”

  “Yes, nothing. What were you expecting? You think I should have reported it to the police for her? At fifteen?”

  Camille says nothing. There are many things he could say if he weren’t so exhausted, but what he needs now is information.

  “What exactly did she tell you?”

  “That he hurt her. Every time, he hurt her.”

  “How close were you exactly?”

  She smiles.

  “You want to know if we were sleeping together? At thirteen?”

  “Alex was thirteen, you were fifteen.”

  “That’s true. O.K., yes. I initiated her, as they say.”

  “How long did the relationship last?”

  “I don’t remember, not long. Alex wasn’t exactly … committed, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “To her it was just a distraction.”

  “A distraction?”

  “What I mean is, she wasn’t really interested in a relationship.”

  “But you managed to persuade her?”

  Reine Leroy doesn’t like the tone of this sentence.

  “Alex made her own decisions! She was perfectly capable of making up her own mind.”

  “At thirteen? With a brother like hers?”

  *

  “Absolutely,” Louis takes over again, “I absolutely think that would help us, Monsieur Vasseur.”

  He seems a little preoccupied.

  “There’s just one small detail I’d like to clear up first. You say you don’t remember Monsieur Maciak, the café owner in Épinay-sur-Orge, and yet according to Distrifair’s records you visited him at least seven times in the space of four years.”

  “Sure, I visited lots of clients …”

  *

  Reine Leroy stubs out her cigarette.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened. One day, Alex just disappeared. She was gone for days. And when she came back, it was over. She never spoke to me again. Then later, my parents moved house, we moved away, and I never saw her again.”

  “When was this?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, it’s all so long ago. It was late in the year. 1989, maybe … I honestly couldn’t say.”

  56

  From the far end of the office, Camille is still listening. And drawing. From memory, as always. It is a sketch of Alex at about thirteen, on the lawn of the house in Normandy, posing with her best friend, their arms around each other’s waists, clutching plastic cups. Camille is trying to capture her smile in that photograph. Her face. This is what he can’t quite catch. In the hotel room, her eyes were lifeless. He can’t capture her expression.

  “O.K.,” Louis says. “Let’s move on now to Jacqueline Zanetti. Did you know her any better?”

  No answer. The net is closing. Louis is like the epitome of a country solicitor, scrupulous, considerate, meticulous, organised. A pain in the arse.

  “So, tell me, Monsieur Vasseur, how long have you been working for Distrifair?”

  “I started in 1987, as you know very well. I’m warning you, if you’ve been to see my employer …”

  “What?” Camille interrupts him from the far end of the room.

  Vasseur wheels round, livid.

  “If we’ve been to see your employer …” Camille repeats the phrase. “That sounds like a threat to me. But please, carry on, I’m fascinated.”

  Vasseur doesn’t have time to answer.

  “How old were you when you started at Distrifair?” Louis says.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Tell me something …” Camille interrupts once more.

  Vasseur is constantly being forced to turn from Louis and Armand to Camille and back again, so he gets up, angrily turns his chair so it’s at an angle and he can see all three of them without having to turn this way and that.

  “Yes?”
>
  “Were things good between you and Alex at the time?” says Camille.

  Vasseur smiles. “My relations with Alex were always good, commissioner.”

  “Commandant,” Camille corrects him.

  “Commandant, commissioner, captain, I don’t give a shit.”

  “You were sent on a training course by the company,” Louis picks up again. “This would have been in 1988, and …”

  “O.K., alright, fine, I know Zanetti. I fucked her once – let’s not make a big deal out of it.”

  “You were in Toulouse on three separate occasions, each time for a week …”

  Vasseur makes a face as if to say What do I know, you think I remember all that?

  “Oh yes, I assure you, we checked, you stayed three times, each time for one week, from the seventeenth to the—”

  “O.K., fine, I was there three times!”

  “Keep your temper.” This is Camille again.

  “This routine you three have got going, it’s like some old comedy sketch,” Vasseur says. “The golden boy leafing through the file, the tramp asking the questions and the dwarf at the back of the classroom with his colouring book.”

  Camille sees red. He leaps from his chair and charges. Louis is already on his feet, he puts a restraining hand on his boss’s chest, closes his eyes as if to say I’ll handle it. This is how he often deals with Camille, he mimes the appropriate behaviour hoping that the commandant with fall into line, but this time it does no good.

  “And you, you fat bastard, what’s your shtick? ‘Yeah, I fucked her when she was ten and it was great’ – where exactly do you think that’s going to get you?”