Irene (10 page)

“Sociologically, what sort of man are we looking at?” Camille asked.

“White, European, educated. Not necessarily intellectual, but cerebral nonetheless. Aged between thirty and fifty. Lives alone. He may be widowed or divorced … but I suspect he’s a bachelor.”

“What sort of repetitive patterns should we be focusing on?” asked Louis.

“That’s a tough call. In my opinion, this is not his first crime. I would say it is like a capillary wave; he works in concentric circles moving outward from the centre. He may have started out raping women, then later torturing them before moving on to murder. That would be the obvious trajectory. The constants in this case are few. The only things we can pinpoint with any certainty are: the victims are prostitutes; they are young; he tortures them; he kills them. Beyond that …”

“Is he likely to have a history of mental illness?”

“It’s possible. For minor behavioural problems. But we’re dealing with an intelligent man, someone so used to deluding himself that it is easy for him to dupe others. No-one has been able to give him peace. Women are his last hope. He desperately demands something that they cannot give, and in doing so his violence will continue to escalate until and unless you arrest him.
He has devised a logic schema for his urges. This logic, which I mentioned a moment ago, this intricate staging … It is because of this that he can move from desire to deed. But the pattern is not the goal, in my opinion. You might argue that this is the case with most serial killers, but he is different. The evident perfectionism indicates that he has an exaggerated opinion of his work. I’m not talking about some noble mission … but it’s not far off. For as long as this mission persists, two things are certain: the first is that he will go on killing; the second is that the barbarity of his crimes can only increase.”

Crest looked from the
juge
to Camille and then to Le Guen, then he stared uneasily at the assembled company.

“This man is capable of committing barely imaginable acts of violence … if he has not already done so.”

Silence.

“Anything else?” Juge Deschamps asked, laying her hands on her desk.

“Maniac!”

Irène, that evening. Dinner at a restaurant.

Time had passed at an alarming rate since the announcement of her pregnancy. Her belly and face had filled out, her movements were slower, heavier. And to Camille’s eyes these changes had not
been as gradual as he expected, they came in sudden waves, in stages. Arriving home one evening, he noticed that her freckles had suddenly multiplied. He said something about it, in a nice way, because he found it pretty but a little startling. Irène had smiled and patted his cheek.

“Darling … it really hasn’t been all that sudden. It’s just that we haven’t had dinner together for more than a fortnight.”

This rankled. The image Irène had conjured was a cliché – the man at work, the woman waiting patiently at home – and he didn’t know what pained him more, the situation itself or the sheer banality of it. Irène was never out of his mind, she filled his whole life, a hundred times a day he thought about her, a hundred times a day the fact that they were about to have a baby suddenly overwhelmed him, disrupting his work, and he saw the world anew as though he had just had cataracts removed. So, no, he could hardly be accused of abandoning Irène … But in his heart, he could not deny the fact that he had missed a turning. During the first months there had not been a problem. Irène had still been working hard, sometimes late into the night, and they had always lived their life making a virtue of necessity. Some evenings they would meet up on the spur of the moment in some restaurant midway between his office and hers, or they could call each other, shocked to realise it was almost 10 p.m., and rush to catch a late-night showing at a nearby cinema. It had been a simpler time, filled with simple pleasures. Things had changed after Irène had had to stop work and began spending whole days at home. “He keeps me company,” she would say, stroking her belly, “but he’s not much of a talker yet.” And this was the turning that Camille had missed. He had gone on working as before, not realising that their lives were no longer in sync. So tonight, there
could be no question of failure. At the end of the day, and after much hesitation, he decided to ask Louis, who knew everything there was to know about propriety.

“Look, I need some advice about a restaurant. Something first-rate. It’s our wedding anniversary.”

“I’d recommend Chez Michel,” Louis said. “It’s impeccable.”

Camille was about to ask how much it would set him back, but his self-respect flashed a warning light and he said nothing.

“Otherwise there’s L’Assiette.” Louis said.

“Thanks, Louis, I’m sure Chez Michel will be perfect. Thanks again.”

Irène was ready and clearly had been for quite some time. Camille restrained an urge to check his watch.

“Don’t worry.” Irène smiled. “It’s O.K. You’re late, but within the bounds of acceptability.”

As they headed to the car, Camille worried that Irène’s tread seemed heavier: she was waddling like a duck, her back was arched, her belly lower, everything about her seemed weary.

“Are you alright?”

She stopped for a moment, laid a hand on his arm and, suppressing a smile, she said, “I’m fine, Camille.”

He thought he could sense exasperation in her tone and in
that guarded smile, as though he had already asked the question and ignored the answer. He cursed himself for not taking enough interest in her. Irritation gnawed at him. Even though he loved this woman, perhaps he was not a good husband. They walked for a while, neither of them speaking, the silence between them like some inexplicable abandonment. Words failed. As they passed a cinema, Camille fleetingly noticed the name of an actress, Gwendolyn Playne. As he opened the car door, he wondered why the name seemed familiar, but nothing came to him.

Irène got into the car without a word and Camille asked himself how they had got into this mess. Irène must have been asking herself the same question, but she was the wiser of the two. Just as he was about to drive off, she took his hand and placed it on her thigh, high up next to her swollen belly, then laying a hand on his neck she pulled him close and kissed him long and hard. They stared at each other, surprised to have burst the bubble of silence in which they had seemed trapped.

“I love you, Monsieur Verhœven,” Irène said.

“And I love you, Madame Verhœven,” said Camille, studying her closely. He ran his fingers across her forehead, around her eyes, over her lips. “I love you, too.”

Chez Michel. It was, as Louis had promised, impeccable. Utterly Parisian, with mirrors everywhere, waiters in starched black trousers and white coats, raucous as a railway station, the Muscadet ice cold. Irène was wearing a dress printed with red and yellow flowers. But although she had been careful to buy the largest size, the dress had failed to keep pace with her burgeoning pregnancy and the buttons now yawned slightly as she sat down.

The restaurant was crowded, but the noise afforded them perfect privacy. They talked about the film Irène had had to give
up editing when she took maternity and Irène asked Camille about his father.

The first time Irène had come to dinner, Camille’s father had taken to her as though they had known each other all their lives. At the end of the meal he gave her a present – a painting by Basquiat. Camille’s father had money. He had taken early retirement, sold his practice for an exorbitant sum – Camille did not know how much exactly, but more than enough to buy a lavish, impossibly large apartment, pay a cleaning lady he did not really need, buy more books than he had time to read, more music than he could listen to and, over the past two years, travel widely. One day he had asked Camille’s permission to sell a number of his mother’s paintings, having been pestered by gallery owners since she closed her studio.

“She painted them for people to see,” Camille said.

He himself had none of his mother’s paintings. The only ones he might have wished to own were the first and last.

“Obviously, the money will all come to you eventually,” his father had said.

“Spend it on yourself,” Camille had said, vaguely unsettled by the conversation. The subject never came up again and the paintings were still in his mother’s old studio.

“I called him the other day,” Camille said to Irène. “He seems fine.”

Irène devoured her food as Camille gazed at her.

“Remember to thank Louis for the recommendation,” she said, pushing her plate away.

“I’ll give him the bill while I’m about it.”

“Cheapskate.”

“I love you.”

“I should hope so.”

“So, how’s your case coming along?” Irène asked as dessert was being served. “I heard the investigating magistrate on the radio today … what’s her name? Deschamps, is it?”

“Yeah. What did she have to say for herself?”

“Not much, but the case seems pretty grim.”

Seeing Camille look at her questioningly she continued. “She said that two young women had been murdered in Courbevoie. She didn’t go into details, but it sounded horrific …”

“It is.”

“She mentioned some connection to a cold case in Tremblay. Did you work on that?”

“No, it wasn’t one of mine then, but it is now.”

He did not really feel like discussing the case. To talk about the death of two young women with his pregnant wife on their wedding anniversary felt somehow obscene. But Irène had surely noticed that the dead girls had occupied his every waking thought in the last days, and that each time he managed to put them out of his mind, something or someone reminded him of them. He gave her a general outline of the case, at pains to avoid certain words, certain images, only to trail off into awkward silences, his eyes darting around the restaurant as though searching for some way to explain. His clear, measured account suddenly stopped in midstream as words failed him, and he raised his hands in a helpless gesture. Irène realised that he could not describe the unspeakable.

“The guy’s clearly a psycho …” was Irène’s verdict.

Camille tried to explain that during a lifetime spent on the force, not one in a hundred officers would ever have to deal with a case like this, and not one in a thousand would want to be in his shoes right now. Like most people, Irène’s notion of what his work entailed seemed to come from the detective novels. He foolishly
suggested this to her and Irène snapped:

“When have you ever seen me read a crime novel? I can’t stand them.”

“You’ve read some in your time!”

“I read
And Then There Were None
as a teenager. When I went to Wyoming as an exchange student my father thought it would be the best way to prepare me for the American mind-set. He never was much good at geography.”

“I’m not a great fan myself,” Camille said.

“I’ve always preferred movies,” she said with a smile.

“I know …” He smiled too. They knew each other too well. With the point of his knife, Camille traced the outline of a tree on his napkin. He looked up at her and took a small box from his pocket.

“Happy anniversary.”

Irène had long since accepted that her husband had no imagination. He had given her jewellery on their wedding day, he had given her jewellery when she told him she was pregnant, and now, a few months later, here he was again. But she was not disappointed. She knew she was fortunate compared to those women whose only attentions from their husbands were a Friday night fumble. Irène, on the other hand, had more imagination. She held out the large, gift-wrapped package Camille had seen her putting under her chair as they sat down.

“Happy anniversary to you too.”

Remembering every one of Irène’s gifts, each different from the last, Camille felt a little embarrassed. He tore off the wrapping paper, the diners at the next table glancing over curiously, and took out a book:
The Caravaggio Mystery
. On the cover was a detail from “The Fortune Teller”: three hands, one palm up,
proffered in surrender. Camille, who was familiar with the painting, mentally conjured it now in its entirety: a woman in a white turban whose eyes seem to promise something more than fortune telling, a young man with his gloved hand resting on the pommel of his sword, that youthful, ineffectual arrogance. It was just like Irène to offer her policeman husband the collected works of a murderous painter.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it!”

His mother had loved Caravaggio. He still remembered her talking about “David with the Head of Goliath”. Leafing through the book now, he came across the painting. He stared into the face of Goliath. This was clearly a day for severed heads.

“You would swear that it’s a depiction of Good versus Evil,” his mother used to say. “Look at the fury in David’s eyes, while Goliath’s expression is calm and sorrowful. Where is Good, where is Evil? Now there’s a question …”

After dinner they took a little stroll, wandering hand in hand as far as the
grands boulevards
. In public, Camille had only ever been able to hold Irène’s hand. He would have liked to put his arm around her shoulder, to slip his arm around her waist, to be like other men, and felt saddened not to be able to make this
proprietorial gesture. Over time, this sadness had faded. Holding her hand was a more subtle sign of possession, and one that suited him now. Almost imperceptibly, Irène’s pace slowed.

“Tired?”

“A bit, maybe.” She smiled, breathing hard.

She ran a hand over her belly as though smoothing an invisible crease.

“I’ll go and get the car,” Camille said.

“No, you don’t have to do that.”

But he did have to.

It was late. The boulevards were still thronged with people. They agreed that Irène would sit at a table outside one of the cafés while he went to get the car.

At the corner Camille turned back to look at her. Her face had changed and Camille felt a pang of dread because suddenly the distance between them seemed unbridgeable. Even as she watched the passers-by, her hands clasped over her stomach, Irène had retreated into her own little world, into the mystery of the life growing within her, and Camille felt excluded. But his fears subsided because he knew that this distance that separated them was not about the love they shared. It was much simpler: she was a woman, he was a man. This was the chasm between them, but it was no wider today than yesterday. And it was this distance that had drawn them together. He smiled.