Alex (32 page)

“So … ?”

“And we now know that this Nathalie was in fact your sister Alex.”

“You might know that now, but I had no idea at the time.”

When Louis says nothing, Vasseur feels obliged to elaborate a little.

“You have to realise, Pascal was a complicated guy. He never really had girlfriends. Actually, I thought he was just bragging. He talked about this Nathalie girl all the time, but none of us ever got to meet her. We laughed about it, to tell you the truth. I for one never took it terribly seriously.”

“But you’re the one who introduced Alex to your mate Pascal.”

“No I didn’t, and he wasn’t a mate.”

“Really? So what was he then?”

“Listen, I’m going to come clean with you. Pascal was a
fucking moron; the guy had the I.Q. of a sea urchin. O.K., so I knew him at school, he was a childhood friend, if you prefer – I used to run into him now and again. But he wasn’t what you call ‘my mate’.”

Here, he laughs quite loudly to emphasise how ridiculous the idea is.

“You ran into him now and again …”

“From time to time I’d see him in the bar when I stopped in to say hi. I still know a lot of people in Clichy. I was born there, he was born there, we went to school together.”

“In Clichy.”

“Exactly. You might say we were friends back in Clichy. Will that do you?”

“That’ll do nicely, thank you.”

Louis worriedly buries himself in the case file again.

“So were Pascal and Alex also ‘friends back in Clichy’, as you put it?”

“No, they weren’t ‘friends back in Clichy’ and you’re starting to piss me off with this whole thing about Clichy. If you …”

“Calm down.”

Camille says this. He doesn’t raise his voice. Like a kid with his crayons in the corner, they had forgotten he was there.

“We ask the questions. You answer them.”

Vasseur turns towards him, but Camille does not look up; he goes on sketching. He simply adds,

“That’s how things work round here.”

Finally, he looks up, holds the drawing critically at arm’s length, tilting it slightly and then, just as he peers over the sketchpad adds, “And if you kick off again I’ll charge you with Contempt of Cop.”

Camille sets the sketchpad down on the table and, just before leaning over it again, he says, “I hope I’ve been sufficiently clear.”

Louis pauses for a beat. Vasseur, caught off guard, glances from Louis to Camille and back again, his mouth hanging open. The atmosphere is like a late summer day when a storm breaks unexpectedly and you suddenly realise you’ve come out without a coat, the sky is black as thunder and you’re very far from home. Vasseur looks as though he’s about to pull up the collar of his jacket.

“So?” Louis says.

“So what?” says a bewildered Vasseur.

“So, were Alex and Pascal Trarieux also ‘friends back in Clichy’?”

“No, Alex never lived in Clichy,” Vasseur says. “We moved, she would have been, I don’t know, four or five at the time.”

“So how did she meet Pascal Trarieux?”

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

“So, your sister meets your quotes friend Pascal Trarieux by pure chance …”

“I suppose so.”

“And she tells him she’s called Nathalie. And she murders him with a shovel in Champigny-sur-Marne. And none of this has anything to do with you.”

“What do you want from me? Alex is the one who killed him, not me!”

He’s angry now, his voice becoming shrill, then suddenly he breaks off. Very coldly, he says slowly, “Why are you interrogating me anyway? Have you got something against me?”

“No,” Louis says quickly. “But you have to understand, after
Pascal’s disappearance, his father, Jean-Pierre Trarieux, went looking for your sister. We know he tracked her down, that he abducted her near her home, kept her hostage, tortured her; we believe he was planning to kill her. Miraculously, she escaped … you know the rest. But this is precisely what interests us. What is surprising is that she should be going out with his son under an assumed name. What did she have to hide? But what’s even more surprising is, how did Jean-Pierre Trarieux manage to find her?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, we have a little theory.”

With a sentence like this Camille would have a field day; it would sound like a threat, an accusation – it would be heavy with subtext. With Louis, it’s just a statement. This is the great thing about Louis – his British officer side. Whatever has been decided is what he does. He allows nothing to distract him, to stop him.

“You have a theory,” Vasseur echoes. “Would you mind telling me what it is?”

“When he was looking for his son, Jean-Pierre Trarieux visited everyone he could think of who knew him. He showed them a poor-quality photograph of Pascal with Nathalie. That is Alex. But of all the people he spoke to, you are the only one who must have recognised your sister. And this is precisely what we think happened. We think you gave him her address.”

No reaction.

“However,” Louis goes on, “given Monsieur Trarieux’s agitated state and his explicitly hostile attitude, giving him the address was tantamount to facilitating grievous bodily harm. At the least.”

This piece of information slowly percolates around the room.

“Why would I do any such thing?” Vasseur says, seemingly genuinely curious.

“That is precisely what we would like to know, Monsieur Vasseur. His son, Pascal, had – as you put it – the I.Q. of a sea urchin. The father was not much more evolved and you didn’t have to be a genius to work out what his intentions were. I said that this was tantamount to getting your sister beaten up, but in fact anyone would have realised that he might well have killed her. Is that what you wanted, Monsieur Vasseur? For Jean-Pierre Trarieux to kill your sister? To kill Alex?”

“What proof have you got?”

“Aha!”

This is Camille again. It begins as a roar of joy and ends with an appreciative laugh.

“Ha, ha, ha! I love it!”

Vasseur turns to look at him.

“When a witness asks what proof we have it means he’s not disputing our conclusion,” Camille says. “He’s just trying to wriggle out of it.”

“Right.” Thomas Vasseur has just made a decision. He does so calmly, placing his hands flat on the desk in front of him. He leaves them there and stares at them as he says, “Could someone please tell me what I am doing here?”

The voice is powerful, the sentence thundered like an order. Camille gets up, no more sketching, no more cunning, no more proof: he strides over and stands in front of Vasseur.

“How old was Alex when you started raping her?”

Vasseur looks up.

“Oh, so that’s it …”

He smiles.

“Why didn’t you just say?”

*

As a child Alex kept a diary sporadically. A few lines here and there, then nothing for ages. She doesn’t even always write in the same copybook. Among the stuff in the bin bags, they found all sorts of things. An exercise book with the first six pages filled with spidery writing, a hardback notebook with a picture of a galloping horse against the sunset.

The handwriting is childlike.

Camille reads only one sentence: “
Thomas comes into my bedroom. He comes nearly every night. Maman knows
.”

*

Vasseur gets to his feet.

“O.K., gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me …”

He takes a few steps.

“I don’t think that’s how it’s going to go down,” Camille says.

Vasseur turns. “Really? And how is it going to go down, in your opinion?”

“In my opinion, you’re going to sit down and answer our questions.”

“Questions about what?”

“About you sexually abusing your sister.”

Vasseur looks from Louis to Camille and says in mock alarm, “Really? Is she intending to press charges?”

He’s clearly amused now.

“You’re a bunch of jokers, the lot of you. I’m not going to spill my guts to you; I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

He folds his arms across his chest, tilts his head like an artist looking for inspiration and says in a sensual voice, “The truth
is, I was very fond of Alex. Awfully fond. Enormously fond. She was an adorable little girl, you can’t imagine. A little skinny, and her face was a little plain, but she was delicious. And sweet. And, yes, unstable. You have to understand, she needed a lot of discipline. And a lot of love. That’s often the way with little girls.”

He turns to Louis, spreads his hands, palms up, and he smiles.

“You said it yourself, I was her daddy.”

Then he folds his arms again, satisfied.

“And now tell me, gentlemen, has Alex pressed charges alleging rape? Might I see a copy?”

According to Camille’s calculations, having cross-checked the files, when Thomas “comes into her bedroom”, Alex was not quite eleven. He was seventeen. To come to this conclusion required a number of hypotheses and deductions. Half-brother. Protector. My God, the savagery in this story, Camille thinks. And people say
I’m
brutal.

He comes back to Alex. They have a few childhood photographs, none of them dated, so they have to rely on the background elements (the clothes, the cars) to approximate the year. That, and Alex’s physical appearance. She grows steadily, from one photograph to the next.

Camille has spent a lot of time running through the family
saga. The mother, Carole Prévost, a nursing auxiliary, marries François Vasseur, a printer, in 1969. She is twenty at the time. Thomas is born in the same year. When the father dies in 1974, the boy is barely five and probably has no memory of his father. Alex is born in 1976.

Father unknown.

“He was a useless prick,” Mme Prévost said decisively, oblivious to the pun. She doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. Then again, being the mother of a woman who’s murdered six people is hardly conducive to joke-making. Camille wanted to spare her having to see the handful of images found among Alex’s effects so he took them off the table. Instead, he asked her if
she
had any pictures. She brought a bundle of them. He and Louis organised them, noted the where and when they were taken, and the names of the people Mme Prévost had identified. Thomas, for his part, gave them no photographs, claimed that he had none.

The pictures of Alex as a child show a terrifyingly thin little girl, gaunt face, prominent cheekbones, eyes ringed with dark circles, lips thin and pouting. She poses awkwardly, reluctantly. One of them was taken at the seaside: there are beach balls and parasols, and the shot is backlit. It was taken at Le Lavandou, according to Mme Prévost. Both children are in the picture, Alex, aged ten, and Thomas, seventeen. He stands head and shoulders above her. She is wearing a two-piece swimsuit; she hardly even needs to wear the bikini top – it’s just for show. Her wrists are so thin, two fingers would be enough to encircle them; her legs are so skinny that her knees stick out; her feet are turned a little inwards. The fact that she looks sickly and puny might not matter were it not that her face is ugly. Even her shoulders look wrong. It’s harrowing when you know what you’re looking at.

It was around this time that Thomas Vasseur began to visit her bedroom at night. A little before, a little afterwards, it hardly matters. Because the next set of pictures are not much more encouraging. They show Alex at thirteen. Group and family photographs. Alex stands on the right, her mother in the middle, Thomas on the left. They were taken on the patio of a suburban house. A birthday party. “At my late brother’s place,” says Mme Prévost, quickly making the sign of the cross. A simple gesture can sometimes open up new perspectives. The Prévost family are plainly religious, or were religious – or at least they pay lip service. Camille feels this does not bode well for the girl. In the picture, Alex has grown a little, but only in height. She is still skinny, gangling; she looks awkward and uncomfortable in her own skin. She makes you want to protect her. In the groups she is standing slightly behind the others. On the back of the print, Alex has written:
THE QUEEN MOTHER.
Mme Prévost does not look particularly regal, more like a charwoman in her Sunday best. She is turned towards her son and smiling.

*

“Robert Praderie.”

Armand has taken over. He notes the answers with a new biro on a brand new notepad. This is a big day at the
criminelle
.

“Never heard of him. This is one of Alex’s victims, right?”

“Yes,” Armand says. “He was a lorry driver. His body was found in the cab of his truck at an autoroute service station near the German border. Alex drove a screwdriver into his eye and another into his throat then poured half a litre of sulphuric acid into his mouth.”

Vasseur is thinking.

“Alex always was vitriolic …”

Armand does not smile. This is his strength; he pretends not
to understand or not to care – in fact, he’s completely focused.

“Probably so …” he says. “She certainly had a temper from what I can tell.”

“Women …”

Implication: you know what women are like. Vasseur is the kind of guy who says something lewd and looks around for support. It’s the sort of thing you expect from ageing Lotharios, the dickless wonders, the perverts, but in fact it’s all too common among men of all sorts.

“So, this Robert Praderie,” Armand goes on. “His name means nothing to you?”

“Nothing – why, should it?”

Armand does not respond; he rummages in the case file.

“What about Bernard Gattegno?”

“Are you planning to go through them one by one?”

“There are only six; it won’t take long.”

“How is any of this connected to me?”

“It’s connected to you because you
did
know Bernard Gattegno.”

“I’d be surprised.”

“Oh, but you did … cast your mind back. Gattegno was a garage owner in Étampes. You bought a motorbike from him in, let me see,” he checks the file, “… in 1988.”

Vasseur considers for a moment, then nods.

“Maybe. It’s a long time ago. I was nineteen in 1988; how do you expect me to remember?”

“And yet …”

Armand leafs through the loose pages in the folder.