Irene (6 page)

This time, Camille and Louis immediately step inside. José asks no questions, he lets them pass, his mind probably working overtime trying to think why the police would show up at his place unannounced. This is all he needs. The living room is tiny, with a small sofa and a television. There are a couple of empty beer bottles on the coffee table, a hideous painting hanging on
the wall, the stink of sweaty socks: obviously a bachelor pad. Camille steps into the bedroom. It’s a pigsty, men’s and women’s clothes strewn everywhere, the décor is creepy, the duvet cover is fluorescent plush.

José is leaning against the doorframe, tense, spoiling for a fight, determined not to say anything, to put one over on the Feds this time.

“You live on your own, José?”

“What’s it got to do with you?”

“We ask the questions, José. So, do you live alone?”

“No. I live with Évelyne, but she’s not here right now.”

“And what does Évelyne do for a living?”

“She’s looking for a job.”

“Ah … But she can’t find one, am I right?”

“She hasn’t yet.”

Louis says nothing, he waits to see what approach Camille will take. But Camille suddenly feels immensely weary, because this whole thing is predictable, banal, in his profession even dealing with shitheads becomes a formality. He opts for the fastest route, he wants this over with.

“When did you last see her?”

“She left on Saturday.”

“And is it normal for her not to come home?”

“Well, no, actually,” says José.

And at that moment José realises they know something he doesn’t, that the worst is yet to come and that it will come soon. He glances straight ahead at Louis, and then looks down at Camille. Suddenly Camille is no longer a midget, his is the terrible face of death itself.

“You know where she is, don’t you …”

“She’s been murdered, José. We found her body this morning in an apartment in Courbevoie.”

Only now do they realise that young José is genuinely devastated, that while she was alive Évelyne lived here with him, that he loved her even if she was a prostitute, that she slept here in this room with him. Camille sees the young man’s face crumple, etched with the bewilderment and the grief of true tragedy.

“Who did it?” José asks.

“We don’t know yet. That’s why we’re here, José. We need to know what she was doing there.”

José shakes his head. He has no idea. An hour later, Camille knows everything there is to know about José and Évelyne and the little working arrangement that led this rather shrewd girl to get herself chopped to pieces by a psychotic stranger.

Évelyne Rouvray was
quick on the uptake
. Having been arrested once, she quickly realises she is on a slippery slope and she has only to look at her mother to know that life is about to go downhill, and fast. As for drugs, though she is a user, she is careful to remain a high-functioning addict. She turns tricks at the Porte de la Chapelle and is savvy enough that when clients offer to pay double to do it without a condom, she tells them to fuck off. A few weeks after her arrest, José breezes into her life. They move into the flat on the rue
Fremontel together and get themselves online. Évelyne spends a couple of hours a day at the computer looking for clients, she only does out calls and José always drives her to the meeting place and waits. He plays pinball in the nearest café. José is not really a pimp. He knows that in their little business venture, Évelyne is the boss, she is organised and very careful. Until now. A lot of clients ask to meet up in hotels. This is what happened last week. She met the john at a Mercure hotel. When she came back, she didn’t say much about the client other than that he was a friendly guy, not pervy, and stinking rich. In fact, he had suggested they meet up again a couple of days later. A threesome this time, he left it to Évelyne to find the second girl. His only stipulation was that she be about the same height and the same age. And he’s got a thing for big tits. So Évelyne phoned Josiane Debeuf, a girl she met down at the Porte de la Chapelle; it’s an all-night job, the guy will be alone and he is offering a sizeable wad of cash – the equivalent of two days’ work. He gave her an address in Courbevoie. José drove the two of them there. As they came into the deserted housing development they felt anxious. To make sure everything was above board, they agreed José would wait in the car until one of them waved to let him know it was alright. He was sitting in the car about twenty metres away when the client opened the door. With the light streaming from inside, he only saw him in silhouette. The man shook hands with the two girls. José waited for twenty minutes until Évelyne came to the window and waved. José was quite happy to leave them to it, he was planning to watch the Paris Saint-Germain match on Canal Plus.

As they left José Riveiro’s apartment, Camille asked Louis to put together a file on the second victim, Josiane Debeuf, aged twenty-one. It should be easy to find information on her. The working girls on the Périphérique were usually known to the police.

Finding Irène hale and healthy, lying on the sofa watching television, her hands resting on her belly, a broad smile on her lips, Camille realised that since morning his mind had been swirling with images of dismembered women.

“Are you O.K.?” she asked, seeing him appear with a heavy file under his arm.

“Yes … I’m fine.”

To change the subject, he laid a hand on her stomach and asked, “So, is the baby kicking up a storm in there?”

Hardly had he said the words than the “Nine O’Clock News” came on, with footage of the
identité judiciaire
van slowly pulling away from the rue Félix-Faure in Courbevoie.

By the time they showed up, there was precious little for the T.V. crews to film, so there were shots of the entrance to the apartment from every conceivable angle, closed doors, the last forensics officers leaving the scene, a close-up of the shuttered windows. The accompanying voiceover adopted the solemn tones reserved for national disasters. This alone told Camille that the media had no intention of letting the story drop without good reason. For a split second, he expected a government minister to be formally charged.

There was lengthy footage of the plastic bags. It was not every
day that one saw so many of them. The reporter stressed how little was known about the “terrible tragedy at Courbevoie”.

Irène said nothing. She looked at her husband, who had just appeared on screen. Emerging from the apartment at the end of the day, Camille had simply repeated what he had said some hours earlier. But this time he was on film. Surrounded by a circle of boom microphones, he had been shot from above as though to highlight the strangeness of the situation. Thankfully, the story had been late in reaching the news desks.

“They clearly didn’t have much time to edit the piece,” Irène said in a professional tone.

The images confirmed her evaluation. The footage of Camille was scrappy, they had kept only the best parts.

“Two young women whose identities have not yet been confirmed have been found dead. We are dealing with a … particularly savage crime.” (“What was I thinking, saying something so stupid!” Camille wondered.) “Juge Deschamps has been appointed investigating magistrate in the case. That’s all I have to say for the moment. I’d be grateful if you could allow us to get on with our work …”

“Poor baby,” Irène said when the news story was over.

After dinner, Camille pretended to take an interest in what was on television, then he leafed through a couple of magazines before taking some papers from his desk and, pen in hand, glanced through them until finally Irène said, “You’d be better off getting some work done. It might relax you …” She smiled. “Will you be late?”

“Not at all – I’ll just quickly look over this file and then I’ll come to bed.”

It was 11 p.m. when Camille laid File No. 01/12587 on his desk. It was a thick sheaf of paper. He removed his glasses and slowly rubbed his eyelids. It was a gesture he had always enjoyed. Having been blessed as a child with excellent eyesight, he had sometimes been impatient for the day when he too would do it. In fact, there were two distinct versions of the gesture. In the first, the glasses were removed with a sweeping gesture of the right hand, the head turning slightly to the right as though to add a finishing touch. The second, a more refined version of the first, was accompanied by an enigmatic smile and, when perfectly executed, the glasses were removed, with understated awkwardness, by the left hand so that the right could be held out to the visitor for whom the gesture had been made, like an artistic performance intended as a greeting. In this second version, the left hand removed the glasses and set them down within reach, then massaged the bridge of the nose between thumb and middle finger with the index pressed lightly against the forehead. In this version the eyes remained closed. The gesture was intended to be interpreted as a moment of relief after a long period of intense concentration (a brief sigh could be added if desired). It was the sign of an intellectual gradually – very gradually – growing old.

*

Long experience of reports, court records and witness statements had taught Camille to quickly navigate unwieldy case files.

This case had begun with an anonymous call. Camille flicked to the relevant statement: “There’s been a murder. Tremblay-en-France. The rubbish tip on the rue Garnier.” The killer clearly had his little tics. It’s amazing how quickly people develop a routine.

The repetition was clearly as significant as the words themselves. The formulation was simple, calculated, purely informative, making it clear there was no confusion, no panic, no effect whatsoever. And the fact that this formulation had been repeated was not inadvertent. In fact, it spoke volumes about the self-control – whether real or imagined – of the murderer acting as emissary for his own crimes.

The victim in the Tremblay case had soon been identified as Manuela Constanza, a 24-year-old prostitute of Spanish origin who turned tricks in a seedy hotel on the corner of the rue Blondel. Her pimp, Henri Lambert, known as Lard-ass Lambert – fifty-one years old, with seventeen arrests and four convictions, two of them for living off immoral earnings – had immediately been taken into custody. Lard-ass Lambert did some rapid calculations and decided to confess to being involved in the robbery of a shopping centre in Toulouse on November 21, 2001, which cost him eight months without parole but gave him a solid alibi for the time of the murder. Camille went on leafing through the file.

A series of extraordinarily detailed black and white photographs, then suddenly: a young woman, her body cut in half at the waist.

First photograph: the naked lower half of the mutilated body. The legs splayed. A large hunk of flesh has been ripped from the left thigh
and a long gash, the blood already black, extends from the waist to the genitals. From their position, it is clear that both legs have been broken above the knee. A close-up of one toe shows a fingerprint in black ink made using a rubber stamp. The killer’s signature. Exactly the same as the one at the apartment in Courbevoie.

Second photograph: the upper half of the body. The breasts are covered with cigarette burns. The right breast has been sliced, attached to the body only by a few shreds of skin. The tip of the left breast has been slashed. The wounds on both breasts cut to the bone. It is clear that the young woman was trussed up. The deep marks and burns caused by thick ropes are still visible.

Third photograph: a close up of the head. It is hideous. The face is little more than a gaping wound, the nose is deeply embedded in the skull, the mouth has been slashed from ear to ear with a razor. The face seems to stare out, grinning hideously. The teeth are broken. All that remains is this perverse mockery of a smile. Camille can hardly bear to look. The girl had dark hair of the kind writers like to describe as raven black.

Camille is gasping for breath. He feels a wave of nausea. He looks up, studies the room around him, then bends once more to study the photo. He feels a certain closeness to this young woman who has been hacked in two. He remembers a phrase used by one of the reporters: “This grinning rictus was the ultimate atrocity.” The razor cuts begin precisely at the corners of the mouth and extend in a curve to just beneath the earlobes.

Camille puts down the photos, opens the window and for a long moment he stares out at the rooftops and the street below. The Tremblay murder was committed eighteen months ago, but there is nothing to suggest that it was the first. Or that it will be the last. The question now was, how many more
victims might come to light? Camille was caught between relief and anxiety.

From a technical point of view, there was something reassuring about the way in which the victims had been killed. It neatly corresponded to the classic profile of a psychopath, which was a bonus for the investigation. What was most worrying about the Courbevoie murders was the crime scene itself. Though the killings had clearly been premeditated, there were too many incongruous details: expensive objects left behind, the curious staging of the crime scene, a rather American exoticism, the telephone with no line out … Camille began to delve through the various reports in the file.

An hour later, his worry had found reason to grow and blossom. The murder in Tremblay-en-France had also been characterised by a number of unknowns, and he mentally began to make a list. There was no shortage of strange details. It was immediately apparent that the hair of the victim, Manuela Constanza, was extraordinarily clean. Forensics indicated that it had been washed using a commonly available apple-scented shampoo about two hours before the body was discovered and consequently
post mortem
, since the girl had been dead for at least eight hours. But it was difficult to imagine a murderer mutilating a young girl, hacking her body in two and then taking the trouble to wash her hair. Several of her internal organs were missing. There was no trace of the intestines, liver, stomach or gall-bladder. Camille felt that this rather fetishistic aspect of collecting trophies did not quite square with the initial profile of the psychopath. He would have to wait until tomorrow and the autopsy results on the Courbevoie murders to know whether on this occasion there were organs missing too.