Irene (4 page)

“What was he like?”

“Average …”

“By which you mean?” Louis persisted.

“Average.” Cottet was becoming heated. “What do you want me to say? Average height, average age – he was average!”

There followed a silence during which the three men seemed to ponder the nondescript nature of the modern world.

“But the fact that this photographer was so unprofessional seemed to you to be another guarantee, didn’t it?” said Camille.

“Yes, I admit that’s true,” said Cottet. “Everything was paid in cash, there was no contract and I assumed that the film … I mean, that with that kind of movie we weren’t likely to have any problems with the tenant.”

Camille was the first to get to his feet. Cottet walked them back to the lift.

“You’ll have to make a formal statement, obviously,” Louis explained, as though talking to a child. “And you may be subpoenaed to appear in court, so …”

“So don’t touch anything,” Camille interrupted. “Don’t fiddle your books, don’t go near anything. As far as the taxman is concerned, you’re on your own. We have two girls hacked to pieces, so right now – even as far as you’re concerned – that’s all that matters.”

Cottet stared at them, his eyes vacant, as though trying to gauge the consequences – no doubt he suspected they would be catastrophic – and suddenly his gaudy tie looked as out of place as a cravat on a death-row prisoner.

“Do you have photographs, blueprints?” asked Camille.

“We put together a top-of-the-range presentation brochure …” Cottet began pulling his most dazzling huckster’s smile before realising how inappropriate his smugness sounded, and immediately filing it away for later use.

“Have everything sent over to me straight away,” Camille said, proffering a business card.

Cottet took it gingerly, as though it might burn his fingers.

As they headed back down, Louis commented on the receptionist’s “attributes”. Camille said that he hadn’t noticed.

Even with two teams working,
identité judiciaire
had to spend every waking hour on site. The inexorable ballet of squad cars, motorbikes and vans meant that by late morning a crowd of rubberneckers had gathered. It made you wonder what could have prompted people to come all the way out here. It was like an influx of the living dead from some B-movie. The media showed up half an hour later. Not to photograph the crime scene, obviously, nor was there to be a press statement, but within hours leaks had sprung and by 2 p.m. it seemed better to make a statement than to leave the media to their own devices. Camille phoned Le Guen from his mobile and explained his concerns.

“There’s been a lot of talk around here, too,” Le Guen said.

Camille stepped out of the Courbevoie apartment with only one goal: to say as little as possible.

There were fewer people than he had expected: twenty or so gawkers, fewer than a dozen reporters and – at first glance – no big names, just freelances and ambulance chasers; it was an unexpected opportunity to defuse the situation and gain a couple of precious days.

*

There were two good reasons why Camille was both famous and infamous. His expertise had earned him a solid reputation which
his height had transformed into notoriety. Though it was difficult for cameramen to frame him, the journalists rushed forward with questions for this diminutive man with his peremptory manner. They found him to be curt but candid.

*

On certain occasions – cold comfort, given the many drawbacks – Camille’s physical appearance had its advantages. Once seen, he was never forgotten. He had already refused to appear on various television programmes knowing he had been invited in the hope that he would deliver the stirring monologue of a man “who has brilliantly triumphed over his physical shortcomings”. Clearly, presenters were drooling at the prospect of lead-in footage showing Camille in his Motability vehicle – a car with all the controls on the steering wheel but a police siren on the roof. Camille would have no truck with such publicity – and not just because he hated driving. His superiors were grateful to him for this. Only once had he weakened. A stormy day. An angry day. A day when he would probably have to take the
métro
while people either gawped at him or averted their eyes. He had been invited to participate in a current affairs show on France 3. After the inevitable hand-wringing homily explaining that this was a general interest report he had a duty to represent, the programme researcher had obliquely hinted that Camille stood to gain from it on a personal level, presumably imagining the whole world was desperate for fifteen minutes of fame. This was the day when he had slipped in the bathtub and fallen flat on his face. A miserable day for midgets. He agreed, and his superiors did their best to pretend they were happy for him to appear on the show.

When he arrived at the studios, already depressed at having given in to temptation, he had to take the lift. A woman juggling
an armful of files and tapes got in with him and asked which floor he wanted. With a stoical look, Camille gestured to the button for the fifteenth floor which was a little beyond his reach. The woman gave him a shy smile, but, reaching for the button, she dropped everything she was carrying. When the lift arrived at its destination, the two of them were still on all fours gathering up papers and stuffing them into files. She thanked him.

“I have the same problem hanging wallpaper,” Camille reassured her. “Everything goes pear-shaped.”

The woman laughed. She had a lovely laugh.

He had married Irène six months later.

The reporters were in a hurry.

“Two victims,” Camille began. “Who are they?”

“We don’t know yet. Two women. Young …”

“How old?”

“About twenty-five. That’s all we can say for now.”

“When are they taking the bodies?” a photographer asked.

“In a while. We’re running a bit late. Technical problems …”

A pause in the questions, the ideal moment to rush in:

“I can’t say much right now, but to be honest the case is nothing out of the ordinary. We’ve don’t have much to go on, that’s all. We’ll
be making a statement tomorrow night. Until then, it’s probably best to let the boys from forensics do their work …”

“So what do we run with?” said a young blond guy who looked well on his way to liver failure.

“You say: two women who have not yet been identified. You say: murdered in the past forty-eight hours by person or persons unknown, motive and cause of death yet to be determined.”

“It’s a bit thin!”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

It would have been hard to say less. There was a moment of confusion in the ranks.

And at that precise moment, what Camille had fervently hoped would not happen, happened. The forensics van, having reversed, found it could not get close enough to the entrance of the building because for some mysterious reason there was a concrete planter in the way. The van driver got out and flung open the rear doors and two forensics officers jumped out. The reporters, who up to that point had been distracted, were suddenly riveted as the door to the warehouse apartment opened to reveal the living room wall completely covered with blood spatter like a Jackson Pollock canvas. As if the reporters needed any further confirmation, the officers meticulously began loading the van with clear sealed bags, tagged and ready to be sent to the morgue.

Reporters are a little like those undertakers who can size up a corpse for a coffin with a single glance. Seeing the bags being piled into the van, the hacks could tell the bodies had been dismembered.

“Shit!” the hacks said in chorus.

Before the officers had time to extend the cordon, the photographers were clicking away furiously. The pack divided into
two like a cancerous cell, one half photographing the forensics van and shouting “Over here!” so the grisly removal men would stop and turn to look, the other half grabbing their mobile phones and calling for backup.

“Shit!” echoed Camille.

A complete cock-up. Then he too took out his mobile and made the calls that would put him in the eye of the hurricane.

The boys from
identité judiciaire
had done a good job. Two windows had been cracked open to create a through breeze and the stench of morning had dissipated to the extent that handkerchiefs and surgical masks were no longer necessary.

At this point, crime scenes can be more disturbing than they were before the bodies were removed. It feels as though death has struck a second time, whisking them away.

This particular crime scene was even worse. Only the lab assistants were still there, armed with cameras, rangefinders, tweezers, vials, evidence bags and luminol, and it now looked as though there had been no bodies, as though death had denied the victims the final dignity of a corpse that had once been living. The forensics teams had taken away the severed fingers, the heads, the entrails. All that remained were traces of blood and shit and, stripped of its stark horror, the apartment now appeared very
different. Even to Camille, it looked utterly bizarre. Louis warily eyed his boss, who had a peculiar expression – brow furrowed, eyebrows knitted – as though trying to solve a crossword puzzle.

Louis stepped into the room and headed straight for the T.V. unit and telephone. Camille went into the bedroom. They explored the space like visitors in an art gallery, eager to discover some detail they had previously overlooked. A little later, still brooding, they ran into each other in the bathroom. Louis headed off to make his own inspection of the bedroom and Camille stared out of the window while the forensics technicians unplugged the spotlights and rolled up the cables and plastic sheeting, snapped shut cases and toolboxes. As he wandered through the apartment, his mind made keener by Camille’s troubled expression, Louis’ neurones were firing on all cylinders. And, gradually, he too took on a more preoccupied air, as though he were doing mental arithmetic to eight decimal places.

He found Camille in the living room. On the floor was the suitcase from the wardrobe (top of the range, cream leather with protective metal corners like those on flight cases), which the forensics officers had not yet taken away. It contained a suit, a shoehorn, an electric razor, a wallet, a sports watch and a portable photocopier.

One of the technicians now reappeared and said: “It’s not your day, Camille … there’s a T.V. crew pulling up outside.” He glanced around the room at the blood on the walls and ceiling. “And this is going to be all over the ‘Nine O’Clock News’ from now until doomsday.”

“This was premeditated, it took a lot of careful planning,” said Louis.

“I think it’s more complicated than that. In fact, there’s something about the whole thing that doesn’t add up.”

“It doesn’t add up?”

“No,” said Camille. “Almost everything here is brand new – the bed, the carpets, everything. It’s hard to imagine someone shelling out all that money just to shoot a porn movie. You’d rent a furnished apartment. Actually, usually they don’t rent at all, they find a place they can use for free.”

“A snuff movie?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” said Camille. “It’s possible …”

But they both knew that the vogue for such films had long passed. Besides, the expensive, carefully arranged décor did not quite fit with that kind of hypothesis.

Camille went on pacing the room.

“The fingerprint on the wall over there was too perfect to have been accidental.”

“Nobody would have been able to see anything from outside,” Louis followed his train of thought. “The door was closed, the windows covered. No-one stumbled upon the crime. Logically,
the killer was sending a message to us. He not only premeditated the murders, he claimed them. But I find it difficult to imagine one man creating all this carnage …”

“We’ll see,” said Camille. “But what I find most fascinating is the fact that there’s a message on the answering machine.”

Louis stared at him for a moment, surprised to find that he had lost the thread.

“Why?”

“What bothers me is that you’ve got all the equipment – the phone, the answering machine – except for the most important thing: there’s no phone line …”

“What?” Louis rushed over, tugged on the phone and pulled the low table away from the wall. There was only an electrical socket; the phone was not connected.

“The premeditation is obvious. No-one’s even tried to hide the fact. It’s like everything is right there in plain sight … That’s a bit much.”

Hands in his pockets Camille walked around the room some more and stopped in front of the human genome.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “That really is too much.”

Louis was the first to arrive, followed by Armand. Once they were joined by Maleval, who had been taking a call on his mobile,
Camille’s team, which some officers referred to deferentially or derisively as the “Verhœven Brigade”, were all present and correct. Camille quickly read through his notes, then looked up at his colleagues.

“Any thoughts?

The three men looked at each other.

“The first thing we need to know is how many perpetrators there are,” ventured Armand. “The more there are, the better the chance we can track them down.”

“One guy can’t have pulled off a thing like this on his own,” Maleval said. “It’s not possible.”

“We won’t know for sure until we’ve had the results back from forensics and the autopsy. Louis, bring us up to speed on the rental.”

Louis gave a brief account of their visit to S.O.G.E.F.I. Camille took the time to study Armand and Maleval’s reactions.

The two men were polar opposites: one profligate, the other miserly. At twenty-six, Jean-Claude Maleval had a charm which he abused as he abused everything – late nights, pretty girls, his own body. He was the sort of man who is incapable of thrift. The seasons might change, but still his face was drawn and tired. When he thought about Maleval, Camille found himself a little worried and wondered how expensive his colleague’s vices were. Maleval had the makings of a bent cop in the way that some children, even in nursery school, are clearly destined to be morons. In fact, it was difficult to tell whether he was squandering his years as a single man like a spendthrift might squander his inheritance, or whether he was already on the slippery slope to addiction. Twice in the past few months, Camille had come upon Maleval talking to Louis. On each occasion, they had seemed embarrassed, as
though caught doing something they shouldn’t, and Camille was convinced that Maleval was hitting up Louis for cash. But perhaps not regularly. He decided not to get involved and pretended he had seen nothing.