Irene (19 page)

While Irène was dressing to go out to dinner, Camille popped round to see Louis. The apartment building in which he lived reminded him of Cottet’s opulent mansion. The majestic wooden staircase was beautifully polished, on each landing high double doors afforded access to the apartments. As he came to Louis’ door, he heard voices and hesitated.

Camille checked his watch and was about to ring the doorbell when he heard the voices again. Men’s voices. They were shouting. He had no trouble recognising Louis’ voice, though he could not make out what he was saying. He was involved in a heated argument. The best thing to do, he thought, was to call Louis and tell him he was on his way. He thought about going back downstairs, but it was four flights. In the end, he went up to the next floor, and was just fumbling for his mobile when the apartment door was flung open.

“And I don’t need you saddling your fucking high horse and lecturing me!” roared a voice.

Maleval, thought Camille.

He peered over the banister. The man tearing down the stairs four at a time was wearing a jacket Camille immediately recognised.

Camille forced himself to wait for a long time. Wrapped up in
his thoughts, he counted off the eight times he had to press the time switch on the light. He knew nothing about the relationship between the two men. Perhaps they were closer than he supposed. He had the unpleasant feeling he was prying into something that was none of his business. Finally he went back down the stairs and rang Louis’ doorbell.

On Monday morning, Cottet was still on the run. The team watching his house had seen Madame Cottet go out on Saturday afternoon and return the same evening. Everything seemed normal.

Camille’s flight took off at 11.30 a.m.

He had spent the weekend toying with an idea, and at 7.30 on Monday morning, he realised it had been a waste of time since he had already made his decision.

He left a message for Ballanger at the university, then he dialled the number of the bookshop.

“Jérôme Lesage,” the bookseller’s deep voice interrupted the greeting on the answering machine.

“Aren’t you closed on Mondays?”

“Indeed we are, but I generally come in to catch up on paperwork.”

Camille checked his watch.

“Could I possibly come over for a few minutes?”

“Today is Monday, the shop is closed.”

The bookseller’s tone was not quite brusque, but it was
business-like, direct. To him, the police were no more important than any other customer. In simple terms, in the Librairie Lesage, the police were not going to lay down the law.

“But you’re there,” Camille said hesitantly.

“Indeed I am, and I’m listening.”

“It would be better if we could meet.”

“If it won’t take too long,” Lesage relented.

*

Camille had only to tap lightly on the metal shutter and the bookseller appeared at the next-door entrance. They shook hands quickly and went into the shop via a connecting door.

In the half-light, the bookshop looked sinister, almost menacing. The bookshelves, the cramped office tucked beneath the staircase, the piles of books, even the coat stand seemed shifting and dreamlike. Lesage turned on some lights, but this did not seem to change things. Without daylight, the atmosphere of the place seemed gloomy and furtive. Like a lair.

“I’m going to Scotland,” Camille began without thinking.

“And … that’s why you came to see me, to tell me …”

“A young girl of about twenty was found strangled.”

“Excuse me?”

“The body was discovered in a park.”

“I’m afraid I don’t see …”

“I was wondering whether, as in the previous case, this one might ring a bell.” Camille was struggling to keep his temper.

“Listen,
commandant
,” Lesage said, moving closer, “you have your job and I have mine. When I read about the Courbevoie case, it immediately reminded me of the scene in
American Psycho
. It seemed only right that I should let you know about it, but my ‘collaboration’ ends there. I’m a bookseller, not a policeman. And

*

I have no desire to switch careers.”

“Meaning …?”

“Meaning I don’t want to be bothered every other day with an account of the cases you’re working on. First, because I simply don’t have the time. And secondly, because I have no taste for such things.”

Lesage had stepped forward and now stood in front of Camille, making no attempt this time to keep his distance. Rarely had Camille – who was accustomed to such things – so keenly experienced being “looked down upon”.

“If I were a police informer, you’d know about it, wouldn’t you?”

“And yet you are a police informer. You have already provided vital information in a case without anyone having to ask.” The man blushed. “Your principles seemed to be rather elastic, Monsieur Lesage,” Camille said, turning towards the door.

In his fury, he had forgotten that the metal shutter was down. He turned back, walked around a table of books and headed for the side door by which he had come in.

“Where?” Lesage called after him.

Camille stopped and turned back.

“The murdered girl … where did it happen?”

“Glasgow.”

Lesage immediately recovered his composure. He stared at his shoes for a moment, knitting his brow.

“Any details about the crime?”

“The girl was raped. Sodomised.”

“How was she dressed?”

“A denim trouser suit, yellow platform shoes. From what I know all her clothes were recovered, except—”

“Her underwear?”

Camille’s anger evaporated. He felt overwhelmed. He stared at Lesage who now looked less like a professor than an oncologist about to deliver a diagnosis. He moved along the bookshelves, hesitated for a moment, then took down a book. On the cover, a man wearing a trilby leans on a pool table while, from the depths of the bar, the blurred silhouette of another man seems to be walking towards him. Camille read the cover: William McIlvanney.
Laidlaw
.

“Shit!” he muttered. “Are you sure about this?”

“No, but the details you just mentioned are in the book. I reread it recently so I remember it pretty well. Then again, ‘the worst is not the surest’, as they say. There may be significant discrepancies. It may not be—”

“Thank you,” Camille said, flicking through the book.

Lesage made a curt gesture to indicate that, his duty now accomplished, he was eager to get back to work.

Camille paid for the book, tucked it under his arm, checked his watch and walked out. The taxi was still double-parked.

As he left, Camille shuddered to think how many murders might be contained within the pages of the books in Lesage’s shop.

On the way to the airport, Camille called Louis to tell him the news.

“
Laidlaw
, you said?”

“That’s right. Have you heard of it?”

“No. Should I get a copy sent to Deschamps?”

“No, there’s no need to panic her for the moment; first I need to read the book and have a chat with our English colleagues …”

“Scottish! For God’s sake don’t call them English while you’re there …”

“Thank you, Louis. With our
Scottish
colleagues … to see whether the details in the book mirror those in the case. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. There’ll be time enough to brief Deschamps when I get back.”

Louis’ silence was uncomfortable.

“You don’t agree, Louis?”

“No, no, I agree. I was just thinking about something else. This bookseller of yours seems to be familiar with every last detail of these novels, doesn’t he?”

“I thought the same thing. It troubled me a bit. To be honest, I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“He wouldn’t be the first killer to worm his way into an investigation, to set the police on the trail of the murderer.”

“It’s classic behaviour, I know. What are you suggesting?”

“Just that we take a closer look at him. Discreetly, of course.”

“Go ahead, Louis. That way at least we’ll know for sure.”

*

In the departure lounge, Camille flicked through the McIlvanney book, glancing up every five minutes, unable to concentrate. Ten minutes passed during which he nervously drummed his fingers on a glossy magazine.

Don’t do it, he thought.

Then a flight attendant’s voice announced that boarding would begin in ten minutes.

Unable to stand it any longer, he fumbled for his credit card and his mobile phone.

Timothy Gallagher was a man of about fifty, thin and dark-haired with a disarming smile. He was waiting for Camille in the arrivals hall holding a placard bearing his name. He registered no surprise at the
commandant
’s stature. In fact, it was difficult to imagine the man expressing surprise, or indeed any emotion beyond the cool authority of an officer of the law.

The two men had spoken twice on the phone. Camille had congratulated him on his excellent French, and was sorry that the compliment sounded formulaic when in fact it was sincere.

“The lads here found your theory a little … startling,” the Scot said.

“We were just as startled to be suggesting it.”

“I can imagine.”

Camille had pictured Glasgow as a city with only one season – buffeted by the wind and cold from one end of the year to the other. It is rare for one’s sense of a place to be so quickly validated. Scotland seemed to be a country determined not to disagree with anyone.

To Camille, there was something ancient and aloof about Glasgow; it was a world unto itself. While the taxi drove them from the airport to Pitt Street, where Strathclyde Police Headquarters were located, Camille surrendered to the strange, exotic landscape of this pink and grey city which tended its parks and green spaces in the faint hope that one day summer might pay a visit.

*

Camille moved along the line, briskly shaking the hands of the officers in order of seniority. The meeting at police headquarters began at precisely the hour arranged.

Gallagher had taken the trouble to draft a report summing up the facts of the case and, given his colleague’s rudimentary English, offered to read it to him in French. Camille shot the man a smile that was grateful but discreet, as though he had already adopted the Calvinist temperance of his hosts.

“Grace Hobson,” Gallagher began, “was eighteen years old. A schoolgirl who lived with her parents near Glasgow Cross. She’d spent the evening with her friend Mary Barnes at the Metropolitan, a nightclub in the city centre. The only unusual detail being that Grace’s former boyfriend, William Kilmar, was
at the club that night, and this made her nervous and irritable. According to witnesses, she kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye, and she was drinking pretty heavily. At about 11 p.m., Kilmar disappeared and Grace got up to leave. Her friend Mary Barnes saw her walking towards the exit. When she didn’t come back, her friends assumed that the two of them had had an argument. They certainly weren’t worried by her absence. At about 11.45 p.m., when they were heading home, they looked for her. No-one had seen her since she left the club. Her naked body was found on the morning of July 10, 2001, in Kelvingrove Park. She had been sodomised and strangled. In his statement, Kilmar claimed he hadn’t seen Grace. He confirmed that he left the club at about 11 p.m., met up with another girl outside the club, walked her home, and arrived back at his parents’ house shortly before midnight. On his way home, he ran into two lads from school who lived in the area and were on their way home from a party. They chatted for a couple of minutes. His statement seemed genuine and there was nothing to dispute the facts as he presented them. There were three surprising things about the case. First, the fact that the girl’s panties were missing. The rest of her clothes were found at the scene. Next, there was the fake fingerprint made using a rubber stamp on one of the lassie’s toenails. Lastly, there was a beauty spot on her left temple. It was very realistic, in fact we didn’t realise it was fake until several hours later when her parents came to identify the body. Forensics determined that the mole had been placed there
post mortem
.”

Camille asked a number of questions, and the officers were free and frank with their responses. Strathclyde police did not seem reluctant to share with him the details of the investigation. They showed Camille the crime-scene photographs.

At this point, Camille took out the book he had bought from Lesage. Even this did not seem to surprise the officers. Camille offered to give them a brief account of the plot and a courier was dispatched to buy four copies of the original from the nearest bookshop. In the meantime they had a tea break, and the meeting began again at four o’clock.

Juggling French and English editions, they spent a long time comparing passages in McIlvanney’s text with details from the investigation, focusing especially on the photographs.

In a spirit of reciprocity, Camille set out the details of the French investigations. The officers studied the elements in the case files with the same diligence as they would have had they been their own. Camille could almost see them thinking: “We’re dealing with facts here, cold, hard facts, from which just one possible conclusion can be drawn: if this bizarre and extraordinary theory is correct, then we’re dealing with one madman.”

*

That evening, Gallagher drove Camille to the various locations of the investigation. It was much colder now, but people were strolling around in Kelvingrove Park in T-shirts in a touching attempt to convince themselves that the sultry suns of summer were already here. And perhaps, in Glasgow terms, this was
summer weather. The two men visited the spot where Grace Hobson’s body had been discovered. To Camille it looked exactly as described in McIlvanney’s novel.