Talking to Ghosts (41 page)

They stopped in the car park of a hypermarket next to the petrol station outside Castillon. Vilar immediately got out of the car, slipped the pistol into his belt, stretched himself to shake off the stiffness in his shoulders. He opened the back door and cut Sanz free with the Stanley knife, but the man simply sat there, his head thrown back, his mouth half open. Vilar looked at him, realising he was in a bad way and wondered whether the blow to the head had been just too forceful. He found himself worrying that Sanz would die or lapse into a coma before all this was over. Always supposing it would soon be over, that it would ever be over. It seemed to him that Sanz's dying would be one last dirty trick on his part.

He took a few steps, desperate for a cigarette, looked across the wide expanse of tarmac dotted with little shelters filled with shopping trolleys. It was depressing and ugly. The heat soaked up by the earth now rose in steady waves carrying the unpleasant smell of tar and motor oil. Behind him he heard the sound of voices and laughing. He turned and saw a guy who was filling up at the petrol station chatting to some people sitting in the car. Two or three heads bobbed; the people inside were larking around and the car bounced on its shock absorbers. He could hear them laughing. It was Friday night. A group of mates heading for a nightclub, Vilar thought. An arm appeared through an open window, offering the man holding the petrol pump a square bottle, gin possibly. The guy refused, suggesting his mate stick his dick in it and stop drinking. The car rocked with a roar of laughter.

They shot off in a screech of tyres, and then there was silence. Vilar went back to Sanz who was looking around, dazed.

“Right,” Vilar said, “what the hell do we do now? Are we supposed to wait until opening time? What time is your brother showing up?”

“He'll come when we phone him. You do it. The number's on a piece of paper in my right-hand trouser pocket.”

Vilar dug into the bloodstained pocket, found the paper and dialled the number. Pradeau answered immediately.

“We're at the hypermarket car park. Next to the petrol station.”

“I'll be there in three minutes.”

“What exactly is it that you found?”

“As I said, I'll be right there. Is Éric with you?”

“Of course he's here. I was hardly going to leave him behind. Not alive at any rate.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

They hung up simultaneously. Vilar walked away from the car, sucked air into his lungs to get rid of the weight that was pressing on his chest, gazed at the hypermarket, all its lights out. He could not think straight, could not come up with any plan, any idea. He saw pits filled with water and bodies dumped in them. He saw a figure running away, unreachable. He retraced his steps, watching the road so he would see Pradeau arrive. Sanz was smoking.

“Give me a cigarette.”

Sanz indicated the pack and the lighter on the seat next to him. The cigarette pack was smeared with blood.

“Don't worry, the ciggies are dry.”

He coughed. The same cough he had as he choked and spluttered over his obscenities on the telephone.

The first puff made Vilar dizzy. He took another few steps. He could not picture the sort of place Pradeau would lead him to. He felt as though all his vital functions were suspended: his thoughts, his pulse, his breathing.

He scanned the car park beneath the useless glow of the street lights, and thought about Pablo appearing at the far end, his small frame,
barely visible, caught between the darkness and the artificial light, still held back by the shadows, before suddenly breaking free and walking towards him, his footsteps slow and shaky. He focused every ounce of mental energy he could still muster on this vision, despite the breathless state he had been floating in since they arrived here, because sometimes he let himself go, sometimes he allowed himself to believe in the heart-rending illusion of a magical wish that might come true. He stared at a door and dreamed that it might open so that his son could step through; he listened to the hushed silence, expecting that his mobile would ring and he would hear his boy's voice. He dreamed impossible things, telling himself that for as long as was at all possible, he would stay alive.

The headlights glided towards him almost without a sound. He shuddered when he saw them. He slipped a hand into his pocket and touched the warm steel of the gun and felt miserable that simply touching the pistol reassured him.

Pradeau parked at a right angle to Vilar's car. He opened the door, seemed to hesitate for a second and then stepped out. He glanced at Vilar and then went over to Sanz, leaned into the car and asked him what had happened, how he felt.

“My son hit me with a fucking pickaxe or something, I don't know. Ripped my ear off, the little fucker.”

“Your son? What son?”

“Victor. Nadia's kid.”

“We have to get you to a hospital. Are you in pain?”

“Some. But don't worry about me, I've got painkillers. Anyway, I don't give a shit. You have to take this guy where he has to go. Do what you need to do.”

Vilar stepped closer and listened.

“What the hell are we doing?” he said.

Pradeau waved at him vaguely, to wait or to shut up. He was still bent over his brother, trying to persuade him to let him take him to see a doctor. Sanz was swearing and telling Pradeau to leave him in peace. Their deep voices rumbled inside the car. Sanz was getting angry.

“Look, what does it matter, this is it. You said it yourself … I don't know if I can carry on much further …”

Pradeau stood up again. For the first time since he arrived he looked at Vilar, stared into his eyes, and Vilar could finally see him properly. He was thinner, the skin on his face looked like crêpe paper. His eyes were both too wide or veiled by drooping eyelids. Vilar thought he must have taken something, or that he had been taking so many pills recently that he no longer knew what it meant to sleep. He spoke in a monotone, betraying no emotion, as though talking to a squad before a police operation.

“It's ten minutes from here. I don't know what we'll find there. The guy who hangs out there is called Jean-Luc Lafon. It's his house in the country. He started out as a chartered accountant and compliance officer in the '70s. The sort of work that opens doors, means you've got files on everyone. He was well known in business circles in the area. Heavy industry, wine-making, everyone swore by him. I'm guessing he's still got a lot of dirty laundry he could wash in public. I did a bit of searching – it was easy, Morvan had done most of the groundwork. He gave up everything in '95 to do business with Eastern European countries. I don't know any more than that. Morvan had sent a memo requesting that a formal investigation be opened into Lafon's dealings. He suspected the guy was involved in human trafficking: illegal workers, prostitutes and kids.”

“So, we contact Interpol, we send them Morvan's paper.”

“I don't think you get it. He's the one who has photos of someone we think might be your son. We found more of them on Morvan's hard drive. Lafon swapped files with a ton of people. I've brought a couple if you want to see them. Morvan found them and managed to trace them back to this guy. My brother sent them to you without telling me, there was nothing I could do to stop him, to stop this.”

Vilar felt his eyes fill with tears. He opened his mouth to suck in as much air as he could.

“Just as there was nothing you could do for Morvan, I suppose? Since you couldn't stop this bastard from killing him, you thought you'd give him a hand, is that it?”

Pradeau looked at him without reacting, seeming not to understand what had been said. Then Vilar strode over to the car, grabbed Sanz by his blood-soaked collar and dragged him out. Sanz whined and flailed his arms weakly, collapsing on all fours on the tarmac.

“Pick up your shit before I drive over it. He's getting blood everywhere. And anyway, I don't want him dying in my car. I think I'd rather go alone. Just tell me where it is.”

Pradeau helped his brother to his feet and carried him to his own car where he had no alternative but to let him slump onto the back seat. He closed the car door carefully, as though not wanting to wake the injured man, before coming back to Vilar, standing closer to him than he had when he first arrived.

“I'll come with you. I owe you that at least. There's no knowing how they'll react if they know you're alone and working unofficially. Éric and I knew this guy back in the '90s. He used to throw orgies down at Cap-Ferrat or at Pyla with a whole crowd of filthy rich scum, Éric must have told you.”

“Sandra de Melo already told me everything. And your fucking brother murdered her.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, you know. You've known everything from the start and here I am talking to you instead of putting a fucking bullet in your brain. I don't know what's happening anymore, what I'm doing standing around in the middle of the night with a couple of scumbags when my son might be somewhere nearby in God-knows-what state, Jesus fuck, I don't get it. Why didn't you stop him?”

“I couldn't control him anymore. I knew that if you were sniffing around Nadia's case you were bound to find out about the shit him and me had been mixed up in. And then he decided to fuck with your head with all that stuff about your son. He was crazy, he thought using Pablo was an way of pressuring you so you'd lose it altogether. There was nothing I could do.”

“You could have talked to me. We were friends, weren't we? Isn't that what they call it?”

“I would have had to tell you all this, and there was no way I could do that. Besides, if I'd let you arrest Éric, he would have spilled the whole story. I was trapped … And then there was my mother … He's the only one she still recognises. The only person who still connects her to her past, who could give her back her sense of self – sometimes. I couldn't have taken that away from her, you have to understand …”

Vilar shook his head. He took a step back, drew this pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Pradeau's head.

“I don't understand anything. This is what I should do. And put a bullet in my own head after.”

Tears streamed down his face. His voice trailed off in a dry cough.

Pradeau had not moved. He went on in the same monotone. “When they feel trapped, they're prepared to do anything to save their arses. They murdered two girls who tried to blackmail a magistrate. They'd recognised him because he'd banged up one of their friends for a drugs offence.”

“How do you know that? Was it your brother? Is he the one who … ?”

Pradeau shrugged.

“He made the bodies disappear. He tossed them in the ocean off Hendaye. One of them washed up on Hossegor beach a month later. After that, I got myself out of that shit. I couldn't take it anymore.”

“Of course not, because deep down you're a good man. When it comes down to it, you're just too nice, is that what you're saying? I'm betting it was you who drove the boat, yeah? What were you doing, talking to seagulls?”

“Don't be so fucking stupid. When the girls went missing a month apart I realised what had happened. That was when I got out. That's when Éric and I lost touch. I even stopped going to visit my parents so I wouldn't run into him.”

Vilar glanced towards the car where Sanz lay asleep. He put the gun back in his pocket.

“I don't give a shit about your family problems. Take me to this
place and keep your trap shut. I don't think there's anything else you can say in your defence.”

Pradeau turned away and sighed. He climbed behind the steering wheel of his car and drove off.

Vilar followed him through the centre of Castillon and turned onto a road that had once been an old towpath along the Dordogne. Below them was the river, but they could not see it because it was so utterly black. After a couple of kilometres, Pradeau turned the car onto a dirt track and stopped almost immediately, switching off his headlights. Vilar did likewise and night once again closed over him. He got out of the car, allowed a breath of wind to wash over his face and forced himself to take deep breaths because once again the weight of the darkness was suffocating him. He tried to make something out in the murk, but not a glimmer, not a shadow could be seen. He was aware of the trees only from the rustle of the breeze through the leaves, of the river only from the sound of lapping against the bank.

“Pablo,” he whispered, but this time the name found no echo, was engulfed by shadows, where before the air about him seemed to tremble at the mere mention of the name.

He heard Pradeau click the breech of a gun and slide it into a holster. He saw him shine a torch against his hand to check it was working.

“It's at the end of this path, about a hundred metres. Lafon and his wife will be there, and a younger guy. I've been keeping tabs on them for four days. I haven't spotted anyone else.”

Vilar opened the boot of his car, took out the rifle, felt the weight of the cartridge pouch, then decided to leave them.

Pradeau walked on ahead. As he passed Pradeau's car, Vilar said, “What about him?”

“Are you going to miss him? I think he's asleep. I'll sort him out after. Come on, we don't need any light to follow the path, it's flat and it's not far. It's a big place, almost a mansion. We'll see the lights.”

“No dog?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

They walked on in silence. All that could be heard was their breathing and the crack of footsteps on pebbles. Above the trees to the left a blue halo indicated the lights of Castillon. The house appeared, tall and pale, dimly lit by two small lanterns flanking a flight of steps. Two of the ground-floor windows were clearly lit up. A little further off, on the edge of the circle of light, four cars were parked.

Pradeau stopped dead. Vilar, walking behind, almost bumped into him.