“I … I said no such thing. You’re putting words in my mouth.” Vasseur sounds hurt. He is very calm, but seems very anxious. “I never said such terrible things. No, what I said was …”
Even sitting down he’s taller than Camille; it’s comical. He takes his time, stressing every word.
“What I said was that I loved my little sister. A lot. There’s no harm in that, I assume. It’s not against the law, is it?” In an offended tone he adds, “Or is brotherly love a crime these days?”
His words are those of disgust, of revulsion. But his smile says something very different altogether.
*
For this picture, they have a date. A birthday. On the back, Mme Prévost has written: “Thomas, 16 December, 1989”. The day he turned twenty. The photograph was taken outside their house.
“A SEAT Malaga.” Mme Prévost proudly points out the car. “Second-hand obviously, otherwise I’d never have been able to afford it.”
Thomas is leaning on the car door, which is wide open, probably so you can see the faux-leather interior. Alex is standing next to him. For the photograph, he put an arm protectively round his sister’s shoulders. When you know, you see things differently. Since the print is small, Camille had to use a magnifying glass to see Alex’s face. Unable to sleep the night before, he had drawn this face from memory – he had trouble trying to capture her expression. She is not smiling in the photograph. It being winter, she is wearing a thick coat, but she’s obviously still very thin; she is thirteen.
“So how were things between Thomas and his sister?” Camille asked.
“Good, very good,” Mme Prévost said. “He always looked after his sister.”
Thomas comes into my bedroom. He comes nearly every night. Maman knows.
*
Vasseur looks at his watch, not happy.
“You have three children,” Camille says.
Vasseur can feel the wind shifting. He’s tight-lipped.
“Yes. Three.”
“And you’ve got daughters? Two, isn’t it?”
Camille leans over and peers at the file open in front of Louis.
“That’s right, one called Camille – well, well, just like me – and Élodie … and just how old are they now, the little darlings?”
Vasseur clenches his teeth, says nothing. Louis decides to move the conversation on, to change the subject.
“So, Jacqueline Zanetti …” he begins, but he doesn’t have time to finish the sentence.
“Nine and eleven!” Camille says.
He plants his finger triumphantly on the case file. His smile vanishes in an instant. He turns towards Vasseur.
“And your daughters, Monsieur Vasseur, do you love them very much? And in case you were worried, no, fatherly love is not against the law.”
Vasseur clenches his teeth harder, his jaw muscles visibly contracting.
“Are they unstable? Do they need discipline? Though of course in little girls a need for discipline is often the need for love. Every father knows that …”
Vasseur glares at Camille for a long moment, then suddenly the pressure seems to ease; he smiles up at the ceiling and gives a big sigh.
“You’re really unsubtle, commandant … It’s surprising in a man of your height. Do you really think I’m going to rise to the bait? To punch you in the face and give you an opportunity to—”
He looks round at all of them.
“You’re not just inept, gentlemen, you’re mediocre.”
With this, he stands up.
“You set one foot outside this office …” Camille says.
No-one knows what’s going on. Things have become heated. They’re all on their feet, even Louis; it’s a stand-off. Louis tries to find a way out.
“When you stayed at her hotel, Jacqueline Zanetti was seeing a man named Félix Manière, who was a good deal younger – there was at least twelve years between them. And at the time you would have been nineteen, twenty?”
“You don’t have to beat around the bush. Jacqueline was an old slut! The only thing she cared about was fucking younger men. She probably screwed half the guests in the hotel. She pounced on me the minute I walked through the door.”
“So,” Louis concludes, “Madame Zanetti knew Félix Manière. It’s a bit like the chain we had earlier: Gattegno, whom you knew, was friends with Praderie, whom you didn’t know, and Madame Zanetti, whom you knew, was acquainted with Monsieur Manière, whom you didn’t know.”
Louis turns to Camille worriedly. “I’m not sure I’m being clear.”
“No, I’m afraid it doesn’t sound very clear at all,” Camille says.
“I thought as much. Let me just clarify things.”
He turns to Vasseur.
“Directly or indirectly, you knew all the people your sister murdered.” He turns back to his boss. “Is that better?”
Camille does not seem overly excited. “Sorry, Louis, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re still not being completely clear.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I think.”
Vasseur’s head whips backwards and forwards; these fucking arseholes …
“Would you mind?”
With a chivalrous flourish, Louis steps aside.
“So, Monsieur Vasseur,” Camille says. “Your sister Alex …”
“Yes?”
“Exactly how many times did you sell her?”
Silence.
“Let’s see: Gattegno, Praderie, Manière … You see, we’re not sure we’ve got the whole list. That’s why we need your help, because since you ran the show, you must know how many people you invited round to abuse Alex.”
Vasseur is outraged.
“Are you calling my sister a whore? Have you no respect for the dead?”
A smile begins to play on his lips.
“So tell me, gentlemen, how exactly are you planning to prove all this? I repeat, are you going to get Alex to testify?”
He gives the policemen a taste of his wit.
“Are you going to put the customers on the witness stand? It won’t be easy. They’re not in terribly good health, these alleged clients, are they?”
*
Whether she’s writing in a copybook or a notepad, Alex never gives the date. What she writes is vague – she is afraid of words, even when she’s alone with her diary; she can’t seem to bring herself to say it. It’s as though she can’t find the words. She writes:
Thursday, Thomas came with a friend of his, Pascal. They were at school together. Pascal seems really stupid. Thomas made me stand in front of him, he gave me that look he has. His friend giggled. When we went into the bedroom, he was still giggling, he giggles all the time. Thomas said: you be a good girl for my friend here. Afterwards, it was just him and me in the bedroom, he was on top of me laughing, even when he hurt me, it was like he couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to cry in front of him.
Camille can well imagine the moron pounding away at the girl and giggling. It would have been easy to convince him of anything: maybe even that she was enjoying it. But whatever it says about Pascal Trarieux, about Thomas Vasseur it speaks volumes.
*
“This is all very well,” Vasseur says, slapping his thighs, “but it’s getting late. Are we done, gentlemen?”
“Just one or two minor points, if you don’t mind.”
Vasseur ostentatiously checks his watch, hesitates for a moment, and then accedes to Louis’s request.
“O.K., then, but be quick about it; they’ll be starting to worry at home.”
He folds his arms, as if to say I’m listening.
“I’d like, if I may, to outline our theories to you,” Louis says.
“Good. Personally I like things to be very clear, especially when it comes to theories.”
He seems genuinely happy.
“When you started sleeping with your sister, Alex was ten years old and you were seventeen.”
Vasseur worriedly looks from Camille to Louis.
>
“We are agreed, gentlemen, that you are simply continuing with what are pure speculations.”
“Absolutely, Monsieur Vasseur,” Louis says at once. “I am simply outlining our theories and I merely ask that you point out any internal inconsistencies … things that could not be true, that sort of thing.”
Louis may sound as though he’s going overboard, but in fact this is his usual style.
“Fine,” Vasseur says. “So, these hypotheses of yours …”
“The first is that you sexually abused your sister when she was barely ten years old. An offence, according to article 222 of the penal code, punishable by twenty years’ imprisonment.”
Vasseur raises his finger, his voice professorial.
“If charges were brought, if the case were proven, if …”
“Of course,” Louis interrupts him, no longer smiling. “It’s merely a supposition.”
Vasseur is satisfied; he’s the kind of guy who wants everything done by the book.
“Our second hypothesis is that, after you had abused her, you loaned her out, and probably even rented her to other men. Pimping, contrary to article 225 of the penal code, is punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment.”
“Hang on, hang on! You said ‘loaned’ a minute ago. The other officer …” he nods towards Camille at the far end of the office, “said ‘sold’.”
“I’d like to propose ‘rented’,” Louis says.
“Sold! Just joking … O.K., let’s go with ‘rented’”.
“Rented out to others. First Pascal Trarieux, an old school friend, then Monsieur Gattegno, a customer (in both senses since you were also renting him pinball machines). Monsieur Gattegno clearly recommended your services to his friend Monsieur Praderie. As for Madame Zanetti, a woman you knew intimately having stayed in her hotel, she did not hesitate to suggest your services to her young lover Monsieur Félix Manière, probably as a way to keep him sweet. Maybe to make sure he didn’t leave her.”
“This isn’t just a theory, it’s a whole library.”
“And it has no basis in fact?”
“None at all, to my knowledge. But I admire your logic. And your imagination. Alex herself would probably be impressed.”
“Impressed by what?”
“By all the effort you’re making for a dead girl.”
He glances from one officer to the other.
“It’s not as if she would care anymore.”
“Do you think your mother would care? Your wife? Your children?”
“Oh, no!”
He looks first Louis, then Camille straight in the eyes.
“I’m afraid, gentlemen, that to make such an accusation with no proof and no witnesses would be libel, pure and simple. You do know that’s a crime?”
Thomas says I’ll like him because he’s called Félix, same as the cat. His mother paid for him to come. He doesn’t look anything like a cat. The whole time, he just stared at me, he didn’t say anything. But he had this weird smile, he looks like he wants to eat my head. For a long time afterwards, I could still see his head, his eyes.
There is no other mention of Félix in the notebook, but there is one later, in one of the copybooks. It’s very brief.
The cat came back. He stared at me for a long time again and smiled like he did the first time. Afterwards, he told me to get in a different position and he hurt me a lot. He and Thomas weren’t happy because I was crying too loud.
Alex is twelve, Félix twenty-six.
*
The awkward silence drags on for a long time.
“In this ‘library’ of theories,” Louis says finally, “there remains only one point that we need to clear up.”
“Let’s have done with it, then.”
“How did Alex manage to track down all these people? Because, after all, the original events took place almost twenty years ago. Alex had changed a lot; we know that she went under various aliases, that she took her time, had a strategy. In each of her encounters, she was very methodical. With each of them, the role she played was convincing. A fat, rather slovenly girl for Pascal Trarieux, a classic beauty for Félix Manière … But the question remains: how did Alex track all these people down?”
Vasseur looks at Camille, back at Louis, then back at Camille as though he doesn’t know which way to turn.
“You’re not telling me …” he says in mock horror, “… that you don’t have a theory?”
Camille turns round. Sometimes in this job you have to make sacrifices.
“Actually, we do,” Louis says modestly. “We have a theory.”
“Aaaah … Come on then, I’m all ears.”
“Just as we suspect that you gave Jean-Pierre Trarieux the name and address of your sister, we suspect that you also helped your sister trace these people.”
“But before Alex bumped off all ‘these people’ … And assuming that I knew them,” he waggles a peremptory finger, “how would I know how to find them twenty years later?”
“In the first instance, many of them still lived where they did twenty years ago. In the second, I suspect you only had to give her the names and Alex made her own inquiries.”
Vasseur gives a slow handclap, then suddenly stops.
“And why exactly would I do such a thing?”
57
Mme Prévost wants the world to know she’s not afraid of poverty. She’s a woman of the people, she wasn’t born with a silver spoon, she dragged up two kids on her own, she’s not beholden to anyone … all these platitudes are obvious from the way she sits bolt upright on her chair. She’s not about to let herself be taken in.
Monday, four o’clock.
Her son has been summoned to arrive at five; Camille has coordinated the visits to make sure they don’t see each other, don’t have an opportunity to talk.
The first time, the day the body was identified at the mortuary, she was invited to come in. This time it is a very different matter: she’s been summoned, not that she seems to care – the woman has built her life around her like a fortress. She is determined to be impregnable. What she is protecting is inside her. It’s an uphill struggle. She didn’t come to the morgue to identify her daughter; she told Camille it was too much for her to bear. Seeing her now, sitting opposite him, Camille doubts she has any such weaknesses. But the fact remains that for all her prim propriety, her uncompromising stare, her defiant silence, she is intimidated by the headquarters of the brigade criminelle, and by this little man next to her, feet dangling off the ground, who stares at her intently as he asks: “What exactly do you know about the relationship between Thomas and Alex?”
She looks surprised, as though to say what “exactly” is there to know about the relationship between a brother and sister? That said, her eyes flutter briefly. Camille lets the seconds tick by, but it’s a zero-sum game. He knows, and she knows that he knows. It’s tedious. Camille is out of patience.
“At what age precisely did your son begin raping Alex?”
She makes a terrible fuss. No surprise there.
“Madame Prévost,” Camille says, smiling, “don’t take me for a fool. In fact I advise you to do everything you can to help me because otherwise I’m going to make sure your son’s banged up for the rest of his natural life.”
Threatening her son has the desired effect. She doesn’t care what happens to her, but no-one touches her son. Even so, she sticks to her guns.
“Thomas loved his sister; he would never have touched a hair on her head.”
“We’re not discussing her hair.”
Mme Prévost is impervious to Camille’s humour. She shakes her head; it’s hard to know whether this means that she doesn’t know or that she refuses to say.
“If you were aware of what was happening and you allowed it to continue, you are guilty of accessory to aggravated rape.”
“Thomas never touched his sister!”
“How do you know?”
“I know my son.”
They’re go
ing round in circles. This is impossible: there’s no charge, no witnesses, no crime, no victim, no executioner.
Camille sighs and nods.
Thomas comes into my bedroom. He comes nearly every night. Maman knows.
“What about your daughter? Did you know her well?”
“As well as any mother knows her daughter.”
“That sounds promising.”
“I beg your pardon—”
“No, nothing.”
Camille takes out the slim case file.
“The autopsy report. Since you knew your daughter, I assume you know what’s in here.”
Camille puts on his glasses. Meaning I’m dead on my feet, but here goes.
“It’s a little technical. I’ll translate.”
Mme Prévost hasn’t batted an eyelid since she got here. She sits ramrod straight, her very bones stiff, her every muscle tensed, her whole body an act of resistance.
“She was in a terrible state, your daughter, wasn’t she?”
She stares ahead at the partition wall. It looks as if she’s holding her breath.
“According to the pathologist,” he goes on, leafing through the report, “your daughter’s genital area showed signs of acid burns. I’m guessing sulphuric acid. What people used to call vitriol … These were deep and extensive burns. The clitoris was entirely destroyed – it seems to have been a form of female circumcision – the acid melted the labia majora and the labia minora and penetrated deep into the vagina. The acid was poured directly into the vagina in sufficient quantities that it mutilated everything. The mucous membranes were almost entirely destroyed, the flesh literally dissolved, leaving the whole genital area looking like magma.”
Camille looks up at Mme Prévost, stares hard at her.
“That’s the phrase the pathologist used: ‘a magma of flesh’. All this would have happened long ago; Alex would have been a young girl. Does it ring any bells?”
Mme Prévost looks at Camille; she is deathly pale, and her head shakes like a robot.
“Your daughter never spoke to you about it?”
“Never!”
The word bursts out like a gust of wind, the sudden crack of the family banner.
Alex Page 27
