Irene (26 page)

By early afternoon, the team were working on Cob’s second list. Louis was assigned the case in Perrigny, Élisabeth was dealing with Toulouse, Maleval the officer who had been gunned down in Paris, Armand was working on the Corbeil case, and Camille was looking into the suicide of the police officer in Paris.

The good news was that there was no news. There were not enough parallels between the cases and the novels suggested by Professeur Ballanger. It was abundantly clear that their killer was painstaking about even the smallest details, but each of the cold cases they examined deviated significantly from the novels that might have inspired them. Louis was the first to finish, in less than three quarters of an hour (“No way,” he muttered solemnly), closely followed by Élisabeth and Maleval. Camille then added his folder to the pile with a sigh of relief.

“Everyone want coffee?”

“There’ll be no coffee for you,” Armand said, as he shuffled into the squad room looking apologetic.

In the sudden silence, Camille brought his hands together and rubbed his eyes. Everyone else stared at the pale figure of Armand.

“I think you’ll want to call the
divisionnaire
, and Deschamps, too probably …”

“What’s up?”

“It’s this book,
Le Crime d’Orvical
.”

“Orcival,” Louis corrected him quietly.

“Orvical, Orcival, I don’t give a damn how you pronounce it, but I can tell you that it’s an exact copy of the Corbeil murder. Down to the last detail.”

At this moment Ballanger called Camille.

With his free hand Camille went on rubbing his eyelids. From where he was sitting he could see the cork-board on which were pinned the photographs of the crime scenes in Courbevoie (the severed fingers arranged like the petals of a flower), Tremblay (the dismembered body of Manuela Constanza) and Glasgow (the pitiful body of Grace Hobson). He struggled to catch his breath.

“Any news?” he asked Ballanger warily.

“Nothing that altogether corresponds to any novel we’re familiar with. One of my students thought the March 1998 case, the one where the pregnant woman is disembowelled in a warehouse, sounded similar to a book I’ve never heard of. It’s called …
Shadow Slayer
by someone named Chub or Hub. Never heard of him either. I had a look online but I couldn’t find it. Presumably out of print. And there’s something else,
commandant
: the case of the sales rep murdered in Fontainebleau forest. That rings a bell. There are one or two details that don’t quite match up, but it sounds a lot like
The End of the Night
by John D. MacDonald …”

Louis brought Camille confirmation that Cob had submitted the new ad, which would go up on the
Nuits Blanches
website the following morning. Camille stopped him as he was about to leave.

“Louis, I’d like to know what’s going on between you and Maleval.”

Louis was immediately poker-faced and Camille knew that he would get nothing out of him.

“Men’s business?” he goaded, hoping for some kind of reaction.

“It’s not exactly business, more a little … difference of opinion.”

Camille stood and walked over to him. Whenever he did this, Louis deliberately made himself smaller, perhaps trying to make up for the difference in their heights, or to show some sort of solidarity. Whatever the reason, it was a gesture which Camille found both touching and infuriating.

“I’m going to say something, Louis, and I’m only going to say it once. If whatever is going on has anything to do with work—”

“Absolutely not.”

Camille studied him for a moment.

“I don’t like the sound of this.”

“It’s private.”

“Personal?”

“Private.”

“I’d better go – Le Guen is waiting for me.” Camille turned back to his desk.

Louis walked off and Camille watched him to see which hand he used to push back his fringe, but could no longer remember which gesture meant what. He stood for a moment, brooding, called Cob to check how things were going, then headed for the stairs.

Late in the day, Le Guen finished reading the two memos hastily typed up by Camille. Leaning back in his desk chair, he gripped the document, hands resting on his ample paunch. While he waited, Camille mentally played back footage of the two cases that had recently emerged, as far as he had been able to reconstruct them.

The first memo detailed the “admittedly loose similarities” Ballanger had discovered between the 1950s American novel
The End of the Night
and the murder in Fontainebleau.

On 16 May, 1996, while walking through the forest in Fontainebleau, Jean-Claude Boniface and Nadège Vermontel had come upon the body of a man who had been shot through the head. The dead man was quickly identified as Roland Souchier, a plumbing and bathroom fittings salesman. Ballistics had determined that the bullet had been fired from a .22 automatic, of which there were few in France. The weapon did not appear on the
police database. The victim’s wallet was missing. The possibility that this might simply be a mugging was given further credence when a withdrawal was made later that day with one of the stolen credit cards at a petrol station thirty kilometres south of the crime scene by someone caught on camera driving Souchier’s car.

The detectives on the case had been struck by two details: the first was the use of a Colt Woodsman, a rare American .22 semiautomatic sporting pistol which had not been manufactured since the 1970s.

The second curious fact related to the victim’s clothing. He was found wearing a blue polo shirt and a pair of white moccasins. When she came to identify the body, his wife pointed out that he had never worn such items of clothing; in fact in her statement she said that she “would never have allowed him out wearing clothes like that”.

“Personally, I don’t think it holds together,” Le Guen muttered.

“I rather agree.”

Once again, they compared the details of the crimes with the excerpts Ballanger had faxed over from John D. Macdonald’s novel, which had been published in France in 1962.

“A little further on, it talks about the killer,” Camille said.

“Yeah,” Le Guen grumbled, pulling a face.

The two men sat thinking for a moment.

“You’re right,” Camille said, “it doesn’t add up. Too many details are different. The book specifically states that the victim was stabbed with ‘a little knife’ and that he had ‘on the little finger of his right hand, a heavy lodge ring’: there was no sign of a ring on the body at Fontainebleau. In the novel a cigar butt and a fifth of bourbon are found at the crime scene. There was nothing like that, and no sign of Italian tiles having been smashed against the rocks. It doesn’t match.”

Le Guen was staring into the distance. The silence that ensued was less to do with the case that they had just decided was still cold but rather about another that seemed more troubling.

“As for the Corbeil case,” Le Guen said, “I think we need to talk to the
juge
.”

*

Jean-François Richet was not on holiday, but being a rep allowed him a certain amount of free time, especially in July. He suggested to his sixteen-year-old son Laurent that they have a day out and go fishing on the Seine. It was 6 July, 2000. Usually it was Laurent who found the perfect spot to set up, but on this particular day he never had the time to look. Hardly had he taken a few steps than his father heard him cry out, his voice choked with fear: floating near the riverbank was the body of a woman. She lay in
the shallows, her face half buried in the mud, wearing a grey dress spattered with blood and silt.

The gendarmes from Corbeil were on the scene twenty minutes later. The investigation was efficiently led by Lieutenant-Colonel Andréani. In less than a week they had turned up everything that there was to know, which was nothing much.

The victim, a Caucasian woman of about twenty-five, had clearly been subjected to a brutal beating in the course of which she had been dragged by the hair, as evidenced by bald patches on her scalp from which clumps of hair had been ripped. Analysis confirmed that the killer had hit her with a hammer. The autopsy, carried out by a Doctor Moneir, determined that the victim had died, not from beating, but from twenty-one stab wounds. There was no sign of sexual assault. In the victim’s left hand was a scrap of grey fabric. Time of death was estimated to be approximately forty-eight hours before the body was discovered.

Andréani soon discovered that the woman was one Maryse Perrin, resident in Corbeil, who had been reported missing by her parents four days earlier and had not been seen since by her workmates or her friends. The 23-year-old hairdresser lived at 16, boulevard de la République, in an apartment she shared with her cousin, Sophie Perrin. Everything about her was predictable: she went to the hair salon every morning by bus; she was popular at work, on weekends she and her cousin went out to fashionable clubs, where she flirted with boys and had even slept with one or two of them. There was nothing out of the ordinary except for the fact that she had left home on Sunday, 7 July at about 7.30 a.m. wearing a white skirt and blouse, a pink jacket and flat shoes. She was found four days later, wearing a grey dress and half buried in the mud. The case was never solved. There was no evidence as to how she ended
up in the Seine, or where she had been between the time she left home and the moment she met whoever had murdered her.

Detectives had noticed a number of unusual elements in what was otherwise a run-of-the-mill case. Given the level of violence, it seemed strange that there were no signs of sexual assault. The pathologist confirmed that Maryse Perrin had last had sex quite some time earlier, long enough earlier to be clinically impossible to estimate, but it was certainly a matter of weeks. In her second interview, Maryse’s cousin confirmed that for several weeks she had not gone out, having recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend. The boyfriend, Joël Vanecker, a post-office worker, was interviewed and immediately eliminated as a suspect.

The strangest element was the grey dress in which the victim was found. Since the girl had already been missing from home for two days by the time she was murdered, it was surprising to discover that she had changed her clothes. Detectives could find no explanation for why, when she was found, she was wearing a dress made in the 1860s. Indeed, the fact that it was an antique dress only emerged later. Initially the victim’s cousin, her parents and her friends simply found it odd that Maryse was wearing a ball gown, not simply because she did not own one, but because it was so unlike her style. Puzzled by how threadbare and damaged the dress was, something that could not be explained by the amount of time the body had spent in the water, the forensics team sent it to a clothing expert who, from the nature of the fabric and the way in which it was made, determined that the dress dated from the mid-nineteenth century. The buttons and lace trimmings made it possible to estimate a tentative date of 1863 – give or take two or three years.

Various experts were called upon to value the dress; it became clear that this was not some ordinary crime. In dumping his
victim in the river, the killer had also thrown away a dress worth at least €3,000. The only theory suggested was that the killer had not been aware of its value.

Inquiries were made at shops selling second-hand and vintage clothing, though the limited number of officers working on the case meant that only those shops in the local area were canvassed. After several weeks the investigation had gone nowhere.

That the girl had been “found wearing a grey dress” was not merely a turn of phrase in the officer’s initial report: she had not been wearing it when she was murdered. She had been wearing other clothes when she was beaten and stabbed and only some thirty-six hours later was she dressed in the ball gown. Here, too, there was an unusual element: the killer had not simply thrown the body into the river; he had carefully, almost delicately positioned the girl, attentive to every fold of the dress and to how deeply her face was buried in the mud. Everything about the scene suggested a meticulousness and a painstaking care utterly at odds with a killer who could have brutally stabbed her two days earlier.

The investigating officers had been baffled.

Now, thanks to
Le Crime d’Orcival
, a novel by Émile Gaboriau first published in 1867, which Professeur Ballanger pointed out was among the earliest crime novels, the unusual elements in the case no longer seemed so mysterious. Like the Perrin girl, Gaboriau’s victim, the Comtesse de Trémorel, was blonde and blue-eyed. There could be no doubt that the key details of the murder scene – the positioning of the body, the dress Maryse was wearing, the scrap of fabric clutched in her left hand – perfectly mirrored key details in the novel. The most telling detail of all was that the dress had been made during the period in which the novel was set.

“There’s no fake fingerprint,” Le Guen said. “Why would the guy leave a fingerprint on his other victims and not this one?”

“He didn’t start ‘signing’ his work until the Glasgow murder. Since then, he’s signed all of them. Which means we know about all the murders since then – well … that’s the good news.”

“So now all we have to worry about are the ones still to come,” Le Guen muttered as though to himself.

Irène had made herself a herbal tea.

Sitting in an armchair in the living room, she gazed out at the rain that had been lashing the windowpanes since early evening with a steady insistence.