Hysteria: An Alexander Gregory Thriller (The Alexander Gregory Thrillers Book 2)

by LJ Ross

  The more he listened, the more Segal was beginning to appreciate the possibilities.

  “If you’re right, Doctor, this breaks completely new ground,” he said, working hard to rein in his excitement. “There’s never been another case like it, in the history of the Brigade Criminelle. A woman attacking herself, for having an abortion? It’s sensational.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Caron said, pointedly. “What about Juliette?”

  “If Doctor Gregory’s theory about Camille is correct, that means we’re no longer looking for the same attacker—” Segal said.

  “Really? Why not?” Durand put in. “As Doctor Gregory says, you need to think of the primary identity as an aggressor, whatever the provocation might have been. She tried to kill Camille, a woman she believes to be a separate living entity, not understanding that she would have killed herself in the process. Who’s to say this primary identity doesn’t have a morbid hatred for models, like Camille? Let’s not forget, Juliette was also a mother. She may have formed her own view on Juliette’s approach to motherhood, fuelled by her own deep sense of loss.”

  Gregory had to give him credit for catching on quickly.

  “Although I’d like to say otherwise, I think the inspector is right; we can’t rule out the possibility, especially in the absence of any other suspects.”

  “That’s true enough,” Bernard grumbled. “We’re getting nowhere fast with Juliette’s investigation.”

  Gregory exchanged a glance with the Commissaire, who gave an almost imperceptible nod, then thought back to his conversation with Madeleine the previous day and wondered whether le cochon in the room knew that his days were numbered.

  “You never know what’s waiting around the corner,” he said. “Perhaps there’ll be another breakthrough.”

  CHAPTER 29

  When Jean-Pierre Bisset stepped into the foyer of his local Préfecture de Police de Paris in Barbès, he joined the ranks of the disenchanted who waited in line to speak to a bored-looking officer seated behind a reinforced glass cubicle. It was the very last place he wanted to be and, if it wasn’t for his errant wife, he’d have avoided it like the plague.

  “Theft or assault?” the desk officer said, when Bisset reached the top of the queue some twenty minutes later.

  “Neither,” he muttered. At least, not today.

  “What, then?”

  “It’s—ah, it’s about that woman. The model they’re calling ‘Sleeping Beauty’.”

  “Camille Duquette. What about her?”

  Jean-Pierre shuffled his feet, feeling stupid. Really, what were the chances that Eva—his dowdy little wife—had been masquerading as a fashion model?

  The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed.

  He muttered his apologies and began to turn away, when something caught his eye. Hanging beside a large, laminated poster touting ‘Equal Opportunities and Dignity in the Workplace’, was a smaller poster bearing an image of the woman they were calling Camille and a message that read simply, ‘DO YOU KNOW THIS WOMAN?’

  Yes, he did.

  It was his wife, Eva Bisset.

  He peered at the poster, studying the lines of her face, and thought it was incredible how different she could look. If he’d known what make-up could do for her…well, he wouldn’t have needed to make so many trips to see his favourite girls down in the Quartier Pigalle.

  “She’s really something, isn’t she?”

  He dragged his eyes away from the poster and down into the grinning face of the police officer, feeling a sudden and violent urge to wipe the smug grin off his face.

  “That’s my wife you’re talking about,” he growled.

  To his fury, the man laughed at him from behind the bulletproof glass.

  “Sure, she is,” he said, looking him up and down. “The woman’s lost her memory, not her mind, monsieur.”

  Incensed, humiliated, Jean-Pierre stormed out of the police station and, a moment later, there came the squeal of tyres as he fired up his delivery van, followed by the customary blare of horns and foul language from his fellow motorists.

  But he wasn’t listening, all of his attention now fixated on punishing Eva for the embarrassment he’d suffered and the inconvenience of having to fend for himself these past three weeks. She’d gone missing before—sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a couple of days—and he’d always been careful to remind her of the consequences of her transgression.

  Obviously, he’d been far too lenient in the past, because she’d learned nothing at all.

  In fact, she’d stayed away even longer, and had insulted his family name by masquerading as somebody she wasn’t.

  Camille Duquette, he thought, with a sneer.

  He parked the van and slammed the door shut behind him with unnecessary force, forcing a smile onto his face as he stepped back inside their café—his café, now—and mustered the patience to exchange a word or two with some of the regulars.

  “Eh, Jean-Pierre! When is your wife back from her trip?” one old boy called out, as he spooned up a bowl of seafood broth. “Lovely lady. Always gives me an extra bowl.”

  Does she, indeed?

  Jean-Pierre contemplated knocking the old man’s teeth down his throat, but instead gave him a pat on the back, for the benefit of anyone who may be watching.

  “And I’ll do the same,” he said, expansively. “Louis! Another bowl for Monsieur Marchant!”

  His smile remained fixed in place until he climbed the stairs to the private apartment they kept above the restaurant. Once he’d shut the door behind him, his hands curled into fists. Drunk with anger and adrenaline, he staggered into the master bedroom and looked around at the flowery covers and meagre selection of cheap perfumes she’d left on the dresser below a cheap, framed print of Monet’s Garden at Giverny.

  He went for the bottles first, scooping them into the bin with a smash of glass, then he made for the single rail of clothes she occupied in the large built-in wardrobe they shared. He caught his own reflection in the mirrored doors and smiled manically before snatching up the jumpers and jeans, the plain tee shirts, and the one beautiful thing she’d ever owned: her mother’s wedding dress, which she’d worn on the day he’d told her ‘I do’.

  He threw it on the bed and looked at it for long minutes.

  She needed to be reminded of her duties as a wife, and perhaps putting on the old dress while he reminded her would be sufficient to jog her memory. Eva had spent enough time galivanting, earning money that was rightfully his, but her time was up. He didn’t know who’d attacked her but what did she expect, flaunting herself that way? Maybe it would teach her a lesson in humility, like the one he planned to give her, just as soon as he brought her home.

  For better, for worse; until death us do part.

  Those were the vows they’d made, and, by God, he’d make sure she kept them.

  * * *

  “Inspector?”

  Durand looked up from his desk with a grunt.

  “Call from the station in Barbès,” one of his team said. “Some bloke’s just wandered in, claiming to be Camille Duquette’s husband.”

  “Another one? Tell him to join the queue.”

  He went back to reading his papers.

  “This one might be worth following up. Apparently, he stormed out after the desk officer questioned him, but the officer took a note of the name on the side of his delivery van before he left. He’s Jean-Pierre Bisset—runs Café Michel over in Barbès.”

  “Nice little restaurant,” Durand remarked, having enjoyed some falafel from there once. “What makes him so special?”

  “The local boys asked around and, apparently, Bisset’s wife has a habit of going walkabout, every now and then. She always goes back to him but, word is, she’s been gone for almost three weeks, now, and people are starting to ask questions.”

  Durand looked up at that.

  “And his wife’s name is?”

  “Eva.”<
br />
  Durand fired up his computer and ran a quick search for ‘EVA BISSET’.

  There was no record in Missing Persons.

  “I thought you said she’d gone missing before?”

  “Apparently so, but the husband never files a report. The duty officer had never seen the man in the station before.”

  Durand nodded, ran a separate search for driving license and social security data, and then leaned back in his chair as a grainy passport photo popped onto the screen.

  “Mon Dieu,” he murmured.

  The hair was different, the clothes too—and even the way she smiled into the camera told him Eva Bisset was a different personality to Camille Duquette.

  And yet they were one and the same.

  CHAPTER 30

  After the police briefing, Gregory made his way back to Camille’s apartment, never more eager to try to piece together the fragments of her broken mind. It had been a battle to keep the procureur away, who’d been eager to see for himself the remarkable case of the woman with two personalities but, as Gregory had told him in no uncertain terms, his patient was not a circus oddity to be gawked at.

  In almost all cases of dissociative identity disorder, there was a history of childhood trauma, but significant adult trauma was not unheard of either. To find the root cause, he needed to understand the ‘primary identity’ and how it had come to split, creating the woman they knew as Camille.

  To do that, he needed to keep distractions to a minimum.

  He looked across at the woman slumped in the armchair beside the window, every line of her body folded in defeat. She raised a shaking hand to her face, patting the bandage on her cheek and then let it fall away again.

  “I haven’t heard from the police lately,” she said dully. “Do you know whether they’ve made any progress finding the person who did this?”

  Of course, he thought. The primary identity wouldn’t know.

  “Yes, there’s been some progress,” he said quietly. “But, before we talk about that, can you tell me your name?”

  She looked surprised; as if she expected him to know.

  “Eva Bisset,” she said, casually answering the question that had puzzled them for days.

  She became anxious.

  “Has Jean-Pierre been in touch? I haven’t seen him, and I’m worried he doesn’t know where to find me,” she said.

  “Is Jean-Pierre your husband?”

  She nodded, pressing her lips together.

  “Would you like me to contact him for you?”

  There was a visible battle, the expression on her face shifting until it settled into a sneer.

  “Why the hell would I want you to contact him? He’s nothing but a bully, and he treats her like shit.”

  “Good morning, Camille,” he said, after a pause.

  “Hello again,” she said, rearranging herself in the chair to get a better look at him. “You look a bit tired, today, Doctor.”

  “Thanks,” he said, with a smile. “You were telling me about Jean-Pierre being a bully. To whom?”

  “Her. The woman who works at Café Michel.”

  “What’s her name?” he asked softly.

  “Eva.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “I don’t know…boring, mousy. No good at anything,” she said, unconsciously repeating the words Jean-Pierre had said, so many times before.

  “Have you spoken to her?” he asked.

  “I’ve tried,” she said. “But you can’t force anyone to leave, can you? It’s up to her.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “Not for a while,” she said. “I last saw her a few weeks ago, at the café.”

  “Do you go there regularly?” he wondered.

  She shook her head.

  “Only a couple of times before,” she said. “The day I met Gabrielle Leroux.”

  “At the Place Vendome?”

  “She was there, too. I saw her scooter.”

  Gregory thought he was beginning to understand the timeline of events. Eva Bisset had been at the Place Vendome making a delivery, when she’d been spotted by Gabrielle Leroux. The meeting triggered a deep desire to be a part of the world she’d only ever seen from afar, but Eva Bisset was in the early stages of pregnancy and knew there was no way in the world her domineering husband would allow her to take up the opportunity.

  And so, her psyche created another version of herself who could, and named her Camille.

  But Camille hadn’t wanted the baby.

  “Tell me about the abortion, Camille,” he said, wondering when or if Eva would return to what was, by any standards, a remarkable conversation.

  “How do you know about that?” she asked.

  “The clinic got in touch,” he said. “They recognised your picture from the news.”

  “Have I been in the news?”

  There was no television in the apartment; only books, lots and lots of them to occupy her mind while she recovered.

  “The police put out an appeal to find your family,” he explained.

  “And has anyone been in touch, yet?”

  Rocky ground, he thought.

  “Let’s talk about that in a moment. You were about to tell me about the abortion, Camille.”

  She heaved a sigh.

  “What do you want to know? I couldn’t keep the baby, not with all the campaigns coming up. I didn’t even have a place to live.”

  “Who was the father?” he asked.

  Camille frowned at him, her face turning pale.

  “Breathe,” he said softly. “Take long breaths in and out.”

  He coached her breathing for a few minutes, pulling her back from a sudden fall in blood pressure that could only have been psychosomatic.

  “She said I was a killer,” she whispered, staring at the air somewhere above his head. “She—she told me I was just like all the rest of them.”

  “The rest of who?”

  She just shook her head.

  “When did she say these things to you, Camille?”

  There was a second’s pause, and then Eva looked up, no longer the demure, downtrodden housewife, but a mother whose reason for continuing to live had been snatched from her.

  “Don’t speak her name to me.”

  The hatred was so strong, so powerful, he could almost feel the force of it pushing him back against the chair.

  But he couldn’t stop. Not when they were so close to being in the same room, all three of them, together.

  “Why? What happened, Eva? Why shouldn’t I say her name?”

  “She’s a murderer,” she spat, and her hands crept down to clutch her stomach. “Do you know what she did? What—what she took from me?”

  More than a foetus, he thought. Much more than that.

  “You wanted the baby.”

  “Yes.”

  Her face crumpled and she bent over, letting out a long, keening wail like a wounded animal. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

  He gave it a couple of minutes, and waited while she cried, not holding her hand but comforting her with his quiet presence.

  “Tell me about your husband,” he said, when the worst had passed.

  Eva rested her head on her hand and looked at him with eyes that were twin pools of misery.

  “Why—why do you want to know about Jean-Pierre?”

  “I want to help you but, in order to do that, I need to understand all the elements of your life.” And why you didn’t want me to call him.

  “Jean-Pierre is thirty-five,” Eva said, proceeding to rattle off the basic facts about the man she’d married. “He’s a chef—a brilliant chef,” she amended quickly, fearful that he might suddenly burst from the shadows, having heard every word she said. “He runs the restaurant my father started up.”

  “And you?”

  “I help out,” she said, downplaying her own contribution.

  Her head lifted suddenly, in outrage.

  “You do much more than that!” Camil
le raged. “I’ve seen you scrubbing floors, balancing books, making deliveries…you never live. As for Jean-Pierre, he’s a liar and a cheat, and that’s the least of his problems.”

  Anger rippled over Eva’s face.

  “You don’t know anything about my life, or about Jean-Pierre,” she snapped.

  The woman moved her head this way and that, and Gregory watched in silent fascination as the two women conducted an argument from within the same physical body; her hand gestures changing to suit whichever personality dominated at the time.

  “Why don’t you show him the scar?” Camille asked. “The one near your eye? Why don’t you tell him how that happened?”

  Eva raised her fingers to the tiny crescent-shaped scar on her right temple, which somehow mattered more than the fresh one running down the length of her face.

  “You can tell me how it happened, if you like,” Gregory murmured. “I’m here to listen.”

  Her eyes fell away.

  “He didn’t mean to do it—”

  “Stop it! Stop making excuses for him! He likes hurting you, Eva. He wants to destroy whatever confidence you have left.”

  Eva shook her head, but the tears began to fall again.

  “You don’t know him like I do,” she said. “He’s a very passionate person, and he gets carried away.”

  “Is that what he tells you, Eva?” Gregory asked.

  She nodded.

  “Really, Doctor, he’s a wonderful husband. He tells me he loves me, all the time,” she said, and implored him to believe her. “He never means for things to get out of hand, he’s just so—so strong…”

  “You can’t really believe that?” Camille said, in the gentlest tone Gregory had heard, so far. “You can’t really be thinking of going back to him—not again?”

  Gregory watched their interplay while the tape recorder on his phone captured the exchange, and realised something important. When he’d researched the diagnosis and treatment of dissociative identity disorder, he’d been disheartened to find a general lack of clinical consensus, no systematic, empirically-based approach. There was only a small number of case studies describing the treatments used and, of those, only very few patients achieved a single, unified identity at the end of it all.