The Circle (21 page)

‘You're going to have nice black eye,' said Zuzka, caressing her swollen eyebrow.

Ziegler looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. A bump was starting to show, mustard yellow to violet. And around her eye, all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Just what I needed to go back to work.'

‘Lift your left arm,' said Zuzka.

She obeyed. And winced.

‘Does it hurt there?'

‘Ow!'

‘You maybe have broken rib,' said Zuzka.

‘I can't have.'

‘Anyway, as soon as we get home, you go and see a doctor.'

Ziegler nodded, pulling on her tank top with some difficulty. Zuzka opened the minibar and took out two miniatures of Absolut and two bottles of fruit juice.

‘And since we can't go out in this fucking rathole without getting attacked, we'll drink here. It will calm the pain. Whoever is less drunk puts the other one to bed.'

‘It's a deal.'

The phone woke him up. He had dropped off on the sofa. He sat up, reached out towards the coffee table where his mobile phone was buzzing and vibrating like an evil insect.

‘Servaz.'

‘Martin? It's me. Did I wake you?'

Marianne's voice … The voice of someone at breaking point – and who had been drinking, also.

‘Hugo's been remanded in custody. Did you know?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then for fuck's sake why didn't you call me?'

There was more than mere anger in her words. There was rage.

‘I was going to, Marianne, I promise you … and then I … I forgot.'

‘
Forgot?
Fuck, Martin, my son gets sent to jail and you forget to tell me?'

That wasn't entirely true. He had wanted to call, but he had hesitated for a long time. And he'd eventually fallen asleep, exhausted.

‘Listen, Marianne, I … I don't think he's guilty. I … you have to trust me, I'll find the culprit.'

‘Trust you? I don't know where I am any more … My thoughts are all over the place, I'm losing my mind, I picture Hugo all alone at night in that prison and I want to go mad. And you … you forget to call me, you don't say a thing, you act as if nothing had happened – and you let the judge send my son to jail even though you told me you believed he was innocent! And you want me to trust you?'

He would have liked to say something, to stick up for himself. But he knew it would be a mistake. The time wasn't right. There was a time for discussion and a time for silence. He had already made this mistake in the past: wanting to justify himself, whatever the cost, wanting to impose his point of view no matter what, to have the final word. It didn't work. It never worked. He had learned … He said nothing.

‘Are you listening?'

‘I've been doing nothing else.'

‘Goodnight, Martin.'

She hung up.

Vertigo

On Monday morning Servaz had an appointment at the morgue for the autopsy results. Translucent windows. Long echoing corridors. Some laughter came from behind a closed door, then silence, and he was alone as he went down to the basement.

In his memory a little boy was dancing and running around his mother. Dancing and laughing in beams of sunlight. His mother, too, was laughing.

He banished the image and went through the swing doors.

‘Good morning, Commandant,' said Delmas.

Servaz glanced over at the big table where Claire Diemar lay. From where he stood he could see her pretty profile. Except that her skull had been meticulously sawn open and he could see the grey mass of her brain gleaming in the neon light. The same went for her torso, split into a Y, her pink viscera showing on the surface of her abdomen. There were samples on a work surface, sealed in hermetically closed tubes. The rest had been put in a bin for anatomical waste.

Servaz thought of his mother. She had suffered the same fate. He looked away.

‘Right,' said the little man, ‘do you want to know whether she died in her bath? I may as well inform you straight away, deaths by drowning are a right nuisance. And when the drowning occurred in a bath, it's even worse.'

Servaz looked at him questioningly.

‘Diatoms,' explained Delmas. ‘Rivers, lakes and oceans are full of them. When water is inhaled, they spread throughout the organism. At present they are still the best sign of drowning we have. Except that urban water is very low in diatoms, so do you see my problem?'

The pathologist removed his gloves, tossed them into a pedal bin and went up to the tap.

‘What's more, any traces of blows to the body are difficult to interpret because of the immersion. Fortunately she wasn't in the water for very long.'

‘Are there traces of blows?' asked Servaz.

Delmas gestured towards the back of his own neck, his chubby pink hands covered in antiseptic soap.

‘A haematoma on the parietal and a cerebral oedema. A very violent blow with a heavy object. I'd say her fate was sealed at that moment, but I suspect she actually died from drowning.'

‘You
suspect
?'

The pathologist shrugged.

‘I told you, the diagnosis is rarely straightforward in cases of drowning. Perhaps the analyses will tell us a bit more. The blood strontium, for example – if the concentration in the blood is very different from the usual, and very close to that of the water where she was found, we can be almost certain that she died at the time she was immersed in that bloody bath.'

‘Hmm.'

‘Same thing for the postmortem lividity: the water delayed it. And then the histological exam didn't come up with much, either …'

He seemed quite put out.

‘And the torch?' asked Servaz.

‘What about the torch?'

‘What do you think of it?'

‘Nothing. Interpretation is your job. I limit myself to facts. In any case, she panicked, and struggled so hard that the ropes left very deep wounds in her flesh. The question is to determine
when
she struggled. Which would in all likelihood exclude the hypothesis of a mortal blow to her skull.'

Servaz was beginning to have enough of the pathologist's cautiousness. Delmas was a competent guy, he knew. And it was precisely because he was competent that he was also extremely cautious.

‘I'd prefer a conclusion that would be slightly more …'

‘Precise? You'll get one, when they've done the tests. In the meantime I'd say there's a ninety-five per cent chance that she was put in that bath while still alive, and that she died from drowning. Not a bad likelihood, eh?'

Servaz thought about how the young woman must have panicked, fear exploding in her chest as the water rose, the dreadful sensation
of suffocation. He thought about the pitilessness of the perpetrator, watching her die like that. The pathologist was right: interpretation was Servaz's job. And his interpretation told him that he was not dealing with an average killer.

‘By the way, have you read the paper?' asked Delmas.

Servaz threw him a cautious glance. He hadn't forgotten the article he'd seen in Elvis's room. The pathologist turned round, reached for
La Dépêche
on a work surface and handed it to him.

‘You should like this – page 5.'

Servaz turned the pages. He didn't have to go far. Huge headline: ‘HIRTMANN WRITES TO POLICE.' For God's sake! The article was only a few lines, and reported an e-mail sent to ‘
Commandant Servaz of the regional crime squad
' by someone calling himself Julian Hirtmann. ‘
According to police sources, it has not been possible at this stage to determine whether it was from the Swiss killer or a hoaxer …
' Servaz couldn't believe it. He began to boil with rage.

‘Great, isn't it?' said the pathologist. ‘I'd love to know which wanker passed on the information. In any case, it must be someone from your squad.'

‘I've got to go,' said Servaz.

Espérandieu was listening to ‘Knocked Up' by the Kings of Leon when Servaz burst into the office.

‘Have you seen your face?'

‘Come with me.'

Espérandieu looked at his boss and understood that this was not a time for questions. He removed his headset and stood up. Servaz had already gone back out. He was striding towards the double doors and the corridor leading to the director's office. They went through the bulletproof door one after the other, past the little waiting room with its leather sofas, and past the reception desk.

‘He's in a meeting!' shouted the secretary as she saw them go by.

Servaz did not stop. He knocked on the door and went in.

‘ … lawyers, notaries, auctioneers … We've been using kid gloves, but we haven't lost a thing,' Stehlin was saying to several members of the Financial Affairs Division. ‘Martin, I'm in a meeting.'

Servaz went over to the big table and tossed the newspaper, open to page 5, in front of the director of the crime squad. Stehlin leaned
over to look at it, examined the headline. And raised his head, jaws clenched.

‘Gentlemen, we will conclude this meeting at another time.'

The four men got up and went out, their expressions full of surprise.

‘The leak must be internal,' said Servaz at once.

Divisional Commissioner Stehlin was in his shirtsleeves. He had opened all the windows to let in the still relatively temperate morning air, and the noise from the boulevard filled the room. The air-conditioning had been out of order for several days. He nodded his head towards the chairs opposite his desk.

‘Do you have any idea who it could be?' he enquired.

In one corner, a scanner was spitting out messages; the commissioner kept it turned on all the time. Servaz said nothing. He had noted Stehlin's tone and knew what this meant: beware of any unfounded accusations … He could not help but compare his new boss to his predecessor, Divisional Commissioner Wilmer, with his carefully groomed goatee and the smile plastered to his lips like a cold sore. For Servaz, the fact that Wilmer had filled this position was proof that an imbecile can go far if he has other imbeciles above him. At his farewell party, the atmosphere had been chilly and formal, and when Wilmer had embarked on his little thank you speech, the applause was reticent. Stehlin had kept his distance, not wearing a tie, in his shirtsleeves like he was today, looking like just another cop. And he had carefully observed his future colleagues. Servaz had observed him, too. He had concluded that his new boss must have grasped how much work lay ahead to repair the damage done by his predecessor. Servaz liked Stehlin. He was a good cop, had been in the field and knew his stuff – he was not some technocrat who opened his umbrella the minute there was a drop of rain.

‘I am sure of one thing,' said Servaz. ‘It isn't Vincent or Samira; I trust them one hundred per cent.'

‘Then that doesn't leave too many possibilities,' said Stehlin.

‘No.'

Stehlin looked unhappy. He crossed his fingers over the desk.

‘What do you suggest?'

Servaz reflected.

‘Let's leak some item only
he
could know. Some erroneous item … If it shows up tomorrow in the newspaper, we'll have killed two
birds with one stone: we'll know for sure that it is
him
, and we'll be able to make a formal rebuttal, thus discrediting both the journalist and his source …'

He hadn't suggested any names, but he knew that the divisional commissioner and he were thinking of the same person. Stehlin nodded.

‘An interesting idea … and what sort of information did you have in mind?'

‘It has to be sufficiently credible for him to take the bait … and sufficiently important for the press to want to talk about it.'

‘You've just come from the pathologist,' suggested Espérandieu. ‘We could imply that Delmas found some vital clue. A clue that would prove the kid's innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt.'

‘No,' said Servaz. ‘We can't do that. But we can say we found a Mahler CD at Claire Diemar's …'

‘But that's the truth,' said Stehlin, puzzled.

‘Precisely. That's the trick. We'll give them the wrong title. When the time comes, we can say with complete sincerity that it was totally wrong, that we never found the Fourth Symphony at her place – without going on, obviously, to specify that we found another CD …' Servaz gave a twisted smile. ‘Consequently, the Hirtmann connection to the Diemar case will be made to look ridiculous and the journalist who published the scoop will be discredited. I'm calling a meeting in five minutes with my team.'

He was already heading towards the door when Stehlin's voice stopped him.

‘Did you say “Hirtmann connection”? Are you suggesting there is a Hirtmann connection?'

Servaz looked at his boss, shrugged as if to feign ignorance, and went out.

Distant rumbling, heat, motionless air and grey sky. The very countryside seemed expectant, frozen like an insect trapped in resin. Barns and fields looked deserted. At around three o'clock, he stopped for lunch at a roadside café where the men were chatting noisily about the performance of the French team and the incompetence of the coach. He gathered that the next match was against Mexico. Servaz almost asked them whether Mexico had a good team but caught himself in time. His sudden interest in the tournament caught him
by surprise, and he realised that he was nourishing a secret hope: that the French team would be eliminated, and soon, so that they could get on with other things.

Lost in thought, he entered the paved streets of the little town almost without realising. He was thinking back to the lorry drivers' conversation in the restaurant, and he was suddenly struck by the fact that everything had happened on a Friday evening in the space of a few hours, during a football match that had the entire country glued to the television. That short period of time was where they had to look. They had to concentrate on what happened just before, and painstakingly reconstitute the unfolding of events. He took his thoughts one step further. He had to start at the beginning: the pub Hugo left a short while before the crime was committed. He was convinced that whoever they were looking for had not chosen the place or the time by chance. He parked his car on the little square beneath the plane trees, switched off the engine and looked at the terrace of the pub. It was packed with youthful faces. Students, boys and girls. As in his day, ninety per cent of the clientele was under twenty-five.