Alex (8 page)

“Maybe she should have been your mother,” Camille said one day, peering up at him.

“That’s low,” Armand muttered. For all his faults he has a sense of humour.

When Camille was forced to take leave, Armand visited him at the clinic. He’d wait until he could find someone driving that way so he didn’t have to pay to get there and he invariably turned up empty-handed, always with a different excuse, but at least he
visited. He was devastated by what had happened to Camille. His anguish was genuine. You work side by side with someone for years only to find out you don’t really know them. All it takes is an accident, a tragedy, an illness, a death for you to realise how much of what you know about them is simply random information. Armand can be generous, though that may sound bizarre. Obviously, he’s not generous with money, or with anything that costs money, but he has a generosity of spirit. Not that anyone in the squad would believe it; mention it and anyone he’s ever hit for money – meaning everyone – would crack up laughing.

*

When he came to the clinic, Camille would give him money to get a newspaper, a couple of coffees from the machine and a magazine. Armand always kept the change. And at the end of the visit, as he leaned out of the window, Camille would see Armand wandering around the car park talking to people leaving the clinic, trying to find someone who could drop him close enough to his place that he could walk the rest of the way.

It’s painful, finding themselves together again after four years. The only person missing from the old team is Maleval. He was kicked off the force. Spent a couple of months on remand. What’s become of him? Camille suspects Louis and Armand still see him from time to time. He couldn’t bring himself to.

The three of them are standing in front of the huge map of Paris, not saying anything, and when the silence starts to feel like a furtive prayer, Camille snorts. He points to the map.

“O.K. Louis, as we discussed, you take the teams up to the crime scene. Get them to comb the area.”

He turns to Armand.

“You, Armand, we’ve got a bog-standard white van, a set of
generic tyres, the victim’s run-of-the-mill meal, a
métro
ticket … You’re spoiled for choice.”

Armand nods.

Camille picks up his keys.

All he has to do is get through today and then Morel will be back.

The first time the man comes back, Alex’s heart heaves into her throat. She can hear him, but she cannot turn to see him. The footsteps are slow, heavy; they echo like a threat. Alex has spent every single hour anticipating his return, has imagined herself being raped, beaten, killed. She has seen the cage being lowered, felt the man grab her by the shoulder, drag her from the cage, slap her, twist her, force her, rape her, make her scream, kill her. Just as he promised. “I’m going to watch you die, you filthy whore.” When you call a woman a filthy whore, it means you want to kill her, doesn’t it?

It hasn’t happened yet. He hasn’t touched her yet; perhaps he’s getting off on the waiting. Putting her in a cage is designed to turn her into an animal, to degrade her, break her, to show her he is the master. This is why he beat her so savagely. These thoughts and a thousand others more terrible still prey on her mind. Dying is no picnic. But waiting for death …

Alex resolves to make a mental note of when he comes, but all sense of time quickly becomes blurred. Morning, daytime, evening, night are all part of a continuum in which her mind finds it increasingly difficult to navigate.

Every time he comes he stands in front of the cage, hands in his pockets, and stares at her for a long time, then he puts his leather jacket on the floor, winches the crate down to eye level, pulls out his mobile and takes a photograph, then walks the short distance to the place where he has dumped everything else – a dozen bottles of water, plastic bags, Alex’s clothes strewn on the floor: it’s hard for her, seeing these things almost within reach. He sits down. For a while he does nothing, he simply watches her. He looks as though he’s waiting for something, but he doesn’t say what.

And then, something, she doesn’t know what, something prompts him to leave; he gets up without warning, slaps his thighs as though to spur himself on, winches the crate up again and, with a final glance, he leaves.

He never says a word. Alex has tried asking questions; not too many because she doesn’t want to make him angry, but he only ever answered once – the rest of the time he says nothing, seems to think nothing, he simply stares at her. As he said: I’m going to watch you die.

Alex’s position is – literally – unendurable.

It’s impossible for her to stand; the cage is not high enough. Impossible to lie down, since it’s not long enough. To sit upright, since the top is too low. She lives curled up on herself, almost into a ball. The pain soon became unbearable. Her muscles have begun to permanently cramp, her joints to seize up; everything is numb, everything is rigid, to say nothing of the cold. Her whole
body is stiff and, as she is unable to move, her circulation has slowed, which adds to the pain of the muscle contractions she must endure. She remembers images, diagrams from her nursing training of atrophied muscles, stiff, sclerotic joints. Sometimes it feels as though she is observing her own body wasting away, as though she is a radiologist, as though this body is not hers and she realises that her mind is beginning to divide into a person who is here and another who is not, who lives elsewhere, the beginnings of a madness that lies ahead, which is the inexorable result of this insufferable, inhuman position.

She cried for a long time, but then she found she had no more tears. She sleeps little, never for very long, since she is continuously woken by muscle spasms. She experienced the first really painful cramps last night, waking up screaming, her whole leg wracked by a terrible spasm. In an attempt to relieve the pressure, she pounded her foot against the planks as hard as she could, as though trying to smash the cage to pieces. Gradually, the cramp passed, but she knows that it had nothing to do with her efforts. The spasm will come back just as it went away. She has succeeded only in rocking the cage. When it starts to swing, it takes a long time to come to a standstill again. After a while it makes her stomach heave. Alex spent hours dreading that the spasm would come back. She monitors every part of her body, but the more she thinks about it, the more painful it becomes.

In the rare moments when she sleeps, she dreams of prison, of being buried alive, or drowned; when it’s not the cramps, the cold, or the fear, it is the nightmares that wake her. Now, having moved only a few centimetres in the space of twenty or thirty hours, she is experiencing convulsions, as though her muscles
are trying to move. These are reflex spasms over which she has no control; her limbs slam against the planks, she howls.

She would sell her soul to be able to stretch out, to be able to lie down for an hour.

On one of his first visits, using another rope, he hoisted a wicker basket up to the cage where it swung for a long time before finally coming to a halt. Though it was very close, Alex had to summon all her reserves of willpower, had to rip her hands pushing them between the slats just to grab part of the contents: a bottle of water and some dry dog food. Or maybe cat food. Alex didn’t stop to think; she wolfed it down. Only later did she wonder whether he had spiked it with something. She has started trembling again, but it’s impossible to know whether she is trembling from cold, from exhaustion, from thirst, from fear … The dog food doesn’t fill her up, it simply makes her more thirsty. She eats it only when the hunger gnaws at her. And then there’s the fact that she has to piss and everything else … At first, she felt ashamed, but what could she do? It splatters beneath the cage like the droppings of some giant bird. The shame quickly passed; it’s nothing compared with the pain, nothing compared with the dread of having to live like this for days on end, unable to move, to change her position, not knowing how long he is planning to keep her captive, not knowing whether he really intends to let her die in this crate.

How long would it take to die like this?

The first few times he came, she pleaded with him, she begged for forgiveness, she doesn’t know why, and once – it just slipped out – she even begged him to kill her. She had not slept for hours, the thirst was excruciating and, though she had chewed it for a long time, she had puked up the dog food, she stank
of piss and vomit; being unable to move was driving her insane and in that instant death had seemed preferable to carrying on. She immediately regretted her words, because she does not want to die, not now – this is not how she imagined her life would end. She still has so much she wants to do. But it doesn’t matter what she says, what she asks: the man never replies.

Except once.

Alex was crying hard, she was exhausted, she could feel her mind starting to wander, her brain becoming a free electron, with no self-control, no ties, no bearings. He had lowered the crate to take a photograph. For perhaps the thousandth time Alex said: “Why me?” The man looked up, as though the question had never occurred to him. He leaned over. Their faces a few centimetres apart, separated only by the slats.

“Because … because you’re you.”

For Alex this was a bolt out of the blue. It was as though everything stopped, as though God had flicked a switch; all at once she felt nothing, not cramp, nor thirst, the ache in her belly, not her bones, frozen to the marrow, her mind was so focused on what he was about to say.

“Who are you?”

The man only smiled. Maybe he’s not accustomed to saying much. Maybe these few words exhausted him. Rapidly he hoisted the cage, grabbed his jacket and left without looking back – in fact he seemed angry. He had obviously said more than he intended.

That time, she hadn’t touched the dog food – he had added more to what was left over – but she took the bottle of water and is saving it. She wanted to think about what he had said, but when you are in such pain it’s impossible to think about anything else.

She spends hours with her arms tensed above her head, her hand gripping, stroking the huge knot in the rope holding up the cage. A knot as big as her fist, incredibly tight.

Over the course of the next night, Alex slipped into a sort of coma. Her mind could not focus on anything. She felt as though her muscle mass had wasted away, that she was nothing but bone, a singular contraction, a vast spasm from head to foot. Up until then, she had been able to stick to a regimen of infinitesimal exercises she repeated every hour or so. Wiggling her toes, moving her feet, then her ankles, turning them three times one way then three times the other, moving up, tensing one calf and relaxing it, tensing it again, then the other calf, stretching her right leg as far as it will go, drawing it back, and again, three times, etc.

But now she no longer knows whether she dreamed the exercises or whether she actually did them. What has woken her is her moaning. At first it sounded as if it was someone else, some voice outside her. Little groaning sounds from deep in her belly, sounds she has never heard before.

And though now wide awake, she could not stop these moans that come in time to the rhythm of her breathing.

Alex realises something. She has started to die.

Four days. Four days the investigation has been going nowhere. Forensics have turned up nothing, the witness statements have led nowhere. Somewhere someone had spotted the white van, somewhere else the van was blue. Somewhere else again, someone reported a woman, their neighbour, missing; they phone her – she’s at work. Another woman being investigated is already on her way home from her sister’s; her husband didn’t even know she had a sister … it’s a nightmare.

The procureur has appointed an investigating magistrate: a young, dynamic guy from a generation that likes things hot and heavy. The media have scarcely published the story – it was mentioned in the news in brief and immediately submerged by the daily wave of rolling news. All in all, they’re no closer to identifying the kidnapper and they still don’t know the name of the victim. Every reported missing person has been checked and none could be the woman on the rue Falguière. Louis has widened the search area to include the whole of Paris, checked into missing persons reports filed several days earlier, then several weeks, finally several months, but nothing; nothing that tallies with the description of a young, pretty girl whose route might have taken her along the rue Falguière in the fifteenth arrondissement.

“So we’re saying no-one knows this girl? She hasn’t been seen for four days and no-one out there is worried?”

It’s almost 10.00 p.m.

The three of them are sitting on a bench, staring at the canal, a neat little row of officers. Camille has left the intern to man the office and taken Armand and Louis out to dinner. When it comes to restaurants, he has no imagination and no memory; trying to remember an address is like pulling teeth. There’s no point asking Armand – he hasn’t been to a restaurant since the last time someone else offered to pay, which means the place has probably been closed for donkey’s years. As for Louis, anything he might recommend is well beyond Camille’s budget. For dinner, his idea of a simple little restaurant is Taillevent or Ledoyen. So Camille takes the decision. La Marine on the Quai de Valmy, more or less next door to his building.

Time was, they had a lot to talk about. When they worked together, they quite often had dinner after clocking off. The rule was that Camille always paid. By his reckoning, letting Louis pay would be humiliating to the others, reminding them that though he works as a police officer, he’s not short of money. No-one would even think to ask Armand: if you invite Armand to dinner, you’ve already offered to pay. As for Maleval, he always had money problems and everyone knows how that turned out.

Tonight, Camille was glad to pick up the tab. Though he doesn’t say as much, he’s happy to have his boys back. It’s unexpected. It’s something he couldn’t have imagined three days ago.