Alex (36 page)

The parcel is waiting outside his door, wrapped in brown paper, tied up with string. Camille knows what it is at once. He grabs it and goes into his apartment. Doudouche gets only the most perfunctory pat on the head.

It gives him an odd feeling, seeing Maud Verhœven’s self-portrait. Eighteen thousand euros.

It has to be Louis. He was out of the office this morning, didn’t get in until two o’clock. To Louis, spending 18,000 euros on a painting is nothing. Still, Camille feels uncomfortable. In situations like this it’s difficult to know what’s implicitly owed to the other person, what’s expected, what to do. Accept, refuse, say something? What? Gifts always imply some form of quid pro quo – what is Louis expecting to get in return? As he undresses and gets into the shower, Camille reluctantly returns to his worries about what to do with the proceeds of the auction. The idea of donating it all to good causes is terrible – it’s a gesture that says to his mother
I want nothing more to do with you
.

He’s a little old to be thinking like this, but when it comes to parents, you’re never done – look at Alex. He towels himself off, reaffirms his decision. He’ll do it calmly. Giving up the money is hardly disowning his mother. It’s just a means of closure.

Am I really going to do this, give everything away?

The self-portrait, on the other hand, he plans to keep. He looks at it as he gets dressed again; he has propped it up on the sofa opposite him. He’s happy to have it back. It’s a magnificent work. He’s not angry with his mother – surely this is what wanting to
keep the painting means. For the first time, this man who has always been told he takes after his father sees in the painting a resemblance he himself has to his mother. It comforts him. He is sorting his life out. He doesn’t know where this is heading.

Just before setting off again to the
brigade
, Camille remembers Doudouche and opens a tin of cat food.

*

As Camille arrives back at the office, he runs into the lawyer, who’s just finishing up. Armand called time on the client briefing. Thomas Vasseur is still in the main office. Armand has opened the windows to let some air in. The place feels rather chilly now.

When Louis appears, Camille gives him a nod of complicity, but Louis looks at him puzzled; Camille signals to him that they’ll talk about it later.

Vasseur looks to be rather ill at ease; his five o’clock shadow seems to be developing at an alarming rate, like some ad for fertiliser, but there’s still the flicker of a smile on his face that says
You want to send me down, but you’ve got nothing on me and you’ll get nothing. You want war? Bring it on. You must think I’m a complete idiot.
His lawyer advised him to wait and see – always the best tactic – to weigh his words, do nothing rash. For Vasseur, the race against time works the other way: he needs to stall, to drag things out. The lawyer said in order to prolong the detention period, they’ll have to go back to the magistrate with something new and they won’t have anything. Camille can see it all in the way Vasseur’s mouth opens and closes, the way he puffs out his chest; he’s doing breathing exercises.

People say that the first minutes of any encounter encompass the whole relationship in miniature. Camille remembers that the first time he met Vasseur, he hated him on sight. This has had a
significant bearing on how he has conducted this case. And Vidard knows this.

Deep down, Camille and the magistrate are not so different. This is a depressing realisation.

Le Guen told Camille that Vidard approved of his strategy. Wonders will never cease. Right now, Camille’s feelings are complicated. Now that the magistrate has come down firmly on his side, Camille needs to rethink how he’s going to play this. It’s irritating.

Armand begins by noting aloud the date and time, the names and ranks of those present, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

Camille takes the lead.

“Before we get started, we’ll have no more of your crap about ‘theories’.”

Change of tactics. As he says this, Camille marshals his thoughts, checks his watch.

“So, Alex was blackmailing you.”

There’s a tension in his voice. It is as if he is worried about something else.

“Talk me through that,” Vasseur says.

Camille turns to Armand who, caught off guard, flicks his way through the case file, which seems to take an age. Post-It notes and loose sheets of paper flutter everywhere; you have to wonder whether the French Republic has put its faith in the right men. But he finds it: Armand always finds what he’s looking for.

“A loan from your employer Distrifair for 20,000 euros on February 15, 2005. Your house was already mortgaged to the hilt, you couldn’t go to the bank, so you asked your boss. You’re paying the loan back monthly as a percentage of your earnings.”

Vasseur looks doubtful.

“So what?”

Camille gestures to Armand, the loyal dogged detective, who takes over.

“Your bank confirms that you deposited a cheque from your employer to the value of 20,000 euros on February 15, 2005 and drew out the same sum in cash on February 18.”

Camille closes his eyes, silently cheering. He opens them again.

“And why exactly might you need 20,000 euros in cash, Monsieur Vasseur?”

A moment’s hesitation. Even when you’re expecting it, the worst can still come back and bite you on the arse; this is what’s written on Vasseur’s face. They’ve been to see his boss. He’s been in custody for five hours, and there are nineteen hours to go; having spent a career in sales, Vasseur isn’t trained to withstand shocks. He’s taking a hammering here.

“Gambling debts.”

“You gambled with your sister and you lost, that it?”

“No, it’s nothing to do with Alex … it was someone else.”

“Who?”

Vasseur is having difficulty breathing.

“Let’s save time, shall we?” Camille says. “The 20,000 euros was clearly intended for Alex. When we found her body in the hotel room, she still had a little less than 12,000 euros. We recovered your fingerprints from several of the plastic security strips.”

They’ve gone this far. Just how far back have they gone? What do they know? What do they want now?

Camille can see these questions in the wrinkles on Vasseur’s forehead, in his eyes, in the tremor of his hands. It’s deeply unprofessional, and Camille would never admit it to anyone, but he loathes Vasseur. He despises him. He wants to kill him. He
wants to kill him. He had that same thought about the magistrate a couple of weeks ago. You’re not in this job by accident, he thinks; you’re a potential killer.

“O.K., fine,” Vasseur concedes. “I lent the money to my sister. Is that illegal?”

Camille relaxes, as though he’s just chalked a cross on the wall. He smiles, but it is not a nice smile.

“You know perfectly well that it’s not illegal, so why did you lie?”

“It’s none of your business.”

Precisely the words not to say.

“In the situation you’re in, what precisely is none of the police’s business?”

*

Le Guen calls. Camille steps out of the office. The divisionnaire wants to know where they’re at. Difficult to say. Camille opts for being reassuring.

“Not bad. We’re getting there.”

Le Guen doesn’t respond.

“What about your end?”

“The custody extension: it’s going to be tough, but we’ll sort it.”

“Then we’d better get our act together.”

*

“Your sister was n—”

“Half-sister,” Vasseur corrects him.

“Your half-sister, then. Does it make a difference?”

“Of course. It’s not remotely the same – you could at least be accurate.”

Camille glances from Louis to Armand as though to say: “See, he can handle himself.”

“In that case, let’s just call her Alex. You see, we’re not at all
convinced that Alex was planning to kill herself.”

“Well, that’s what she did.”

“Indeed. But you knew her better than anyone; maybe you can explain it to us. If she wanted to die, why was she planning to leave the country?”

Vasseur raises an eyebrow; he doesn’t understand the question.

Camille simply nods at Louis.

“Your sister … Excuse me, Alex bought a plane ticket in her own name the night she died, a flight to Zurich leaving the following morning, October 5 at 8.40 a.m. In fact, while she was at the airport, she bought a travel bag which we found in her hotel room neatly packed and ready to go.”

“That’s news to me … Maybe she changed her mind. As I told you, she was unstable.”

“She checked in to a hotel near the airport; she even ordered a taxi although her car was in the hotel car park. She obviously didn’t want to have the hassle of trying to find somewhere to park and maybe missing her flight. She wanted to make a quick getaway. She also dumped a lot of her personal effects – she was planning to leave nothing behind, not even the bottles of acid. We had forensics test it, by the way: it’s the same stuff she used in the murders, sulphuric acid at 80 per cent concentration. She was running away, leaving France. She was absconding.”

“What do you want me to say? I can’t answer for her. No-one can answer for her now.”

Vasseur glances from Armand to Louis, looking for confirmation, but his heart isn’t in it.

“Granted, you can’t answer for Alex,” Camille says, “but you
are
able to answer for your own actions.”

“By all means, if I can …”

“Of course you can. On the night of Alex’s death, October 4, where were you, let’s say between 8.00 p.m. and midnight?”

Vasseur hesitates. Camille rushes in.

“We’ll help you out … Armand?”

Curiously, perhaps to emphasise the drama of the moment, Armand gets to his feet, like a schoolboy asked to stand up and recite. Diligently, he reads his notes aloud.

“You received a call at 8.34 p.m. on your mobile telephone; you were at home at the time. As your wife says: ‘Thomas got a voicemail from work, some sort of emergency’. A call from work at that hour was very unusual. ‘He was very annoyed,’ she told us. In her statement your wife said you left home at around 10.00 p.m., and you didn’t get back until after midnight. She can’t be more precise – she was asleep so didn’t notice the time, but it could not have been before midnight since that was when she went to bed.”

Vasseur has a lot of information to digest. His wife has been questioned. He wondered about that earlier. What else?

“However,” Armand goes on, “we know that this was not true.”

“Why do you say that, Armand?” Camille says.

“Because the call that Monsieur Vasseur received at 8.34 p.m. was from Alex. The call was logged because she made it from the telephone in her hotel room. We will of course check with Monsieur Vasseur’s phone provider, but his boss has confirmed that there was no such emergency. In fact he said, ‘In our business, we don’t get call-outs in the middle of the night. We’re not the ambulance services’.”

“A very astute point …” Camille says, turning back to Vasseur. But he doesn’t have time to press his advantage.

“Alex left me a message,” Vasseur blurts out. “She wanted to
see me, told me to meet her at half past eleven at Aulnay-sous-Bois.”

“Aulnay … that would be very near Villepinte where she died. O.K., it’s eight-thirty, your darling sister calls. What did you do?”

“I went.”

“Were they a regular occurrence, these meetings?”

“Not really.”

“What did she want?”

“She asked me to meet her, gave me an address – it was only supposed to be for an hour.”

Vasseur continues to weigh his words, but in the heat of the discussion Camille can tell he wants to get it all out; the sentences rattle off like machine gun fire. Vasseur is desperately trying to keep his composure, to stick to his strategy.

“So what did you think she wanted?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Really? You didn’t know?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

“To recapitulate: last year, she extorted 20,000 euros from you. In our opinion she did so by threatening to wreak havoc in your little domestic arrangements, to tell your wife and kids that you raped her when she was ten, that you prostituted her …”

“You’ve got no proof!” Vasseur is on his feet, screaming.

Camille smiles. Vasseur losing his cool is a bonus.

“Sit down,” Camille says calmly. “I said
in our opinion
– it’s a theory. I know how much you love theories.”

He lets the seconds tick by.

“Actually, on the subject of proof, Alex had conclusive proof that her childhood had not been a happy one. She had only to go and see your wife. Women can tell each other these things,
even show them … If Alex had shown your wife the injuries to her private parts, I am willing to wager that it would have created a bit of a stir in the Vasseur household. So, to go back to what I was saying …
in our opinion
, since she planned to leave the country the following day, she had almost nothing in her bank account and only 12,000 euros in cash … she called you to ask for more money.”

“She didn’t say anything about money in her message. Anyway, where would I get money in the middle of the night?”

“We think that Alex was letting you know that you’d have to come up with the money soon, by the time she got herself settled abroad. And that you were going to have to get yourself sorted, because she was going to need more money … It’s expensive, being on the run. But I’m sure we’ll get back to that. For the moment we’ve got you leaving your house in the middle of the night … What did you do?”

“I went to the address she gave me.”

“What address?”

“137 boulevard Jouvenel.”

“And what exactly is at 137 boulevard Jouvenel?”

“That’s the weird thing. Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I don’t know, nothing.”

Louis doesn’t even need Camille to glance over at him; he’s already typing the address into an online mapping site. A few seconds later, he beckons Camille over.

“Well, well, you’re right, there’s nothing. Offices at 135, a dry cleaners at 139, and in between, number 137, a shop for sale. Boarded up. Do you think she was planning to buy a shop?”