The Circle (55 page)

The man seemed to extricate himself from his memories and suddenly looked like a dog who has sniffed a bone.

‘Tell me, why does this old business interest the cops all of a sudden?'

Servaz saw the journalist's gaze go back and forth between Vincent and him. ‘Holy shit! Claire Diemar! The teacher who was murdered … she was in the coach, too!'

Shit, indeed she was, thought Servaz. He could see the wheels begin to spin wildly in the reporter's mind.

‘Bloody hell! She drowned in her bath! You think it was one of the kids who did it? Or a parent? But why six years later?'

‘Time to go,' said Servaz.

‘What?'

‘Get out.'

The journalist bristled. ‘I warn you, there will be an article in
La République
first thing tomorrow. Are you sure you have nothing to say?'

‘Out!'

‘We're in for it now,' said Espérandieu, once he had gone.

‘Let's go on looking.'

The following articles reported that the driver was released due to lack of proof. As time went by, the articles became less and less frequent, today's news effacing yesterday's. From time to time, when something new came to light, a short article mentioned the tragedy, increasingly briefly. As it did in this piece:

SAD IRONY OF FATE: FIRE CHIEF FROM COACH TRAGEDY

DROWNS IN THE GARONNE

‘Looks like the Grim Reaper has been keeping his accounts up to date,' remarked Espérandieu philosophically.

But Servaz felt all his alarm bells go off when he skimmed through the article:

Last night one of the participants in the Néouvielle tragedy lost his life in circumstances strangely reminiscent of the death he helped others to escape last year. It would seem – although the investigation has only just begun – that, for reasons that are as yet unclear, the former fire chief came to blows with a group of homeless people who were loitering on the Pont-Neuf in Toulouse. A witness who saw the scene from a distance declared that things rapidly became heated, then ‘it all happened so quickly'. After a brutal beating, the fire chief was thrown from the bridge. His body was recovered after the witness alerted the police, but it was too late. A search is under way for the culprits.

‘Shit!' exclaimed Servaz, leaping up out of his chair. ‘Call the division! I want everyone on it. Find a list of all the people who had anything to do with the tragedy even remotely and go through every single record! Tell them it's urgent. Tell them we've got the press on our tail.'

Once she had logged into her office computer, it took Irène Ziegler less than three minutes to find the owner of the vehicle with the number plate Drissa Kanté had given her. And hardly more than two minutes to find his profession.

‘Zlatan Jovanovic, Private Detectives. Shadowing/Surveillance/Investigations. At your disposal 24/7. Registered with the prefecture
.'

With an address in Marsac …

Irène flung herself back in her seat and stared at the computer screen.
Marsac
… What if her initial theory had been wrong? What if it wasn't Hirtmann who had been paying someone to spy on Martin? A detective in Marsac. Martin's investigation was focused on the town. She checked her watch. She had an appointment at the courts in Auch for a domestic violence case, then she was expected at the office of her unit commander. Two wasted hours at least. Probably more. After that she would hurry to Marsac to find this Zlatan individual.

She didn't have a warrant, but she'd think of something.

She got up and put her cap on, and wiped a few specks of dandruff off her uniform shirt. A poster on the wall featured a pair of gendarmes posing for the great glory of the gendarmerie. They looked like Barbie and Ken. Ziegler inspected her uniform with a sigh.

‘That was fast,' said Pujol on the other end of the line. ‘The coach driver, Joachim Campos, is in the missing persons database.'

Servaz felt a rush of adrenaline.

‘Why?'

‘Suspicious disappearance. 19 June 2008.'

His heartbeat accelerated. The fire chief had been tossed in the water in June 2005, one year after the tragedy. The coach driver had disappeared in 2008. Claire Diemar had drowned in her bath in June 2010. How many more victims – one per year? Always in the month of June? There was one detail that didn't square with the others: Elvis. His death didn't follow the pattern. He had been the victim of what had to be called attempted murder only a few days after Claire.

Had the perpetrator decided to speed things up? Why? Was it because of the police investigation? Maybe he had been frightened. Maybe he had realised that Elvis, one way or another, could lead the police to him.

‘Ring the hospital,' said Servaz. ‘Ask them if there is any chance Elvis will come out of his coma, so we can question him.'

‘No chance,' Pujol said. ‘The hospital phoned a few minutes ago. He just died from his injuries.'

Servaz swore. Rotten luck. And yet they were close, he was sure of it.

‘Regarding the incident on the bridge, and the fire chief the homeless people tossed in the Garonne: find me the name of the witness,' he said to Pujol.

He put down the phone and turned to Espérandieu, who was behind the wheel.

‘Back to Toulouse. I want a thorough investigation into that Campos guy's file.'

‘I can't take it any more.'

Sarah looked at David. He seemed about to choke, his voice fragile and trembling. She wondered if he was already high or if something else was going on. She knew the extent of his depression. She often thought that while the accident may have been the trigger that had enabled the black angel camped out in David's psyche to spread his wings, it had already been there. Hiding somewhere. She knew about the little brother who drowned in the swimming pool, the one they had entrusted to him though he wasn't even nine years old. She also knew what his bastard father and brother had done to him. She and Hugo talked about it often. Hugo said that David was like a headless duck. Hugo was very fond of David. But David liked Hugo even more. There was a bond between them that was greater than just fraternal. A bond she could not explain. A bond that was even stronger and deeper than the one that united all of them.

Sarah had been one of the first children out of the coach, through the window, when the vehicle was still lying on the slope, held in place by a few trees. It was the young teacher who had died who helped her out; she still remembered how embarrassed he had been, his muttered apologies as he put his hands on Sarah's bottom to shove her out, before he turned round to try and save one of her little schoolmates stuck beneath a seat. Oddly enough, she could remember the young professor's round face perfectly, and his glasses that were just as round (they all made fun of him in class because he had no authority; he was a laughing stock, and Hugo excelled at impersonating him), but she couldn't remember his name. And yet she owed him her life, as did David, as did several members of the Circle. He had ended up at the bottom of the lake with the other victims. On the other hand, she had never forgotten the name of
the pretty new teacher who all the pupils adored. That pretty bitch of a teacher had got out first, crawling on all fours, screaming hysterically and leaving the children to their fate. Deaf to their calls for help. Claire Diemar. Not one of them had ever forgotten her. Imagine their astonishment when there she was at the prep school in Marsac. They remembered how distraught she had seemed when she read the roll call and recognised their names.

All these years, too, Sarah had not forgotten the supervisor with the funny name: Elvis Elmaz. Elvis, who would encourage them to smoke on the sly even though they were only twelve; Elvis, who lent them his Walkman and let them listen to rock music; Elvis who told the boys how to get it on with girls, and who felt her up on the quiet because at the age of twelve she looked sixteen. They admired him and feared him at the same time. They would have liked to be like him. Until the night they discovered that their demi-god was a coward.

Nor had they forgotten the fire chief. He wouldn't allow his men to go in the coach, on the grounds that it could tip into the lake at any moment – but almost all of them had disobeyed his instructions and one of them had lost his life. It was thanks to those disobedient firefighters that there were ten of them in the Circle, and not just two or three. And then there was the driver: not only had he lost control of his vehicle because he was paying more attention to Claire Diemar than he was to the road, but he had also been one of the first to escape. The only person he had helped had been that filthy bitch. No doubt because she was pretty, and because they had flirted on and off, discreetly, during the trip.

‘What was the name of that teacher?' asked Sarah, before placing her lips on the bong and breathing in.

David gave her a glassy look. He seemed completely stoned.

‘The one with the glasses?' said Virginie. ‘The one who saved us? The Frog.'

‘That was his nickname. Doesn't anyone remember his first name?'

‘Maxime,' said David in a thick voice, taking the bong when Sarah handed it to him. ‘His name was Maxime Dubreuil.'

Yes. Now she remembered. Maxime, who pretended not to hear the farts, whistles and laughter behind his back. Maxime, who was constantly pushing his glasses up his nose when he spoke. Maxime Dubreuil.
A hero.
His body had been fished out the next day along
with the others, when the crane lifted the coach out of the water. Sarah remembered how his mother had wept at the funeral, a fragile little woman with a mane of white hair like a cloud of candyfloss.

Would Maxime have approved of what they had done? Surely not. Why did she get the feeling, more and more often, that they had lost their way? Why did she have the impression they were becoming worse than those who had abandoned them?

‘We have to do something about that cop,' said David.

He spoke in a lifeless, apathetic voice. Virginie looked at him, but for once she didn't say anything. They were in the abandoned chapel in the middle of the woods, roughly two hundred metres from the lycée, where they were in the habit of meeting to drink, plot and smoke.

‘It's up to me to take care of it,' he added after a moment.

He passed the pipe on: the water was now a greenish colour.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘You'll see.'

The case of Joachim Campos's disappearance had begun, as usual, with a telephone call. From his girlfriend, who was waiting for him at the La Pergola restaurant on the evening of 19 June 2008, and who was surprised he was so late, then panicked when he didn't show up. The report explained that she had tried to reach him on his mobile twenty-three times that evening, but each time she got his voicemail.

The next morning, she called in sick and went to his workplace. Joachim was no longer a coach driver. Even though there had been no charges against him, he had been sacked for another professional error six months after the accident. He was now a warehouse man. A job that did not offer nearly as many opportunities to flirt with pretty strangers. At his workplace, they told the girlfriend that Joachim had not come in that morning. By mid-afternoon she decided to contact the gendarmerie, who made it clear to her that there was not much that could be done.

But Joachim Campos's girlfriend, as witnessed by the fifty-three new calls she made to the former driver's mobile, was the stubborn type. She harassed the gendarmerie and the police, and finally got what she wanted when a witness came forward, asserting he had seen someone who matched Joachim's description in an old grey
Mercedes on the night of his disappearance – only a few kilometres from the restaurant where they had been due to meet. An interesting detail, according to the same witness, was that there were two men with him in the car.

The case was reclassified as a suspicious disappearance. For obscure procedural reasons, it was taken over by the police in Toulouse – who had worked the union minimum, and as always in these matters, the prosecutor had wasted no time closing the case for lack of evidence.

Servaz took the sheets from Campos's file one by one. He handed half of them to Espérandieu. It was 14.28.

At 15.12, Servaz began to go through the list of calls made to and from Joachim Campos's mobile phone.

One number cropped up a great many times, on the evening of the disappearance and the following days, and Servaz knew without even checking that this would be the stubborn girlfriend. Other people had tried to reach him in the days that followed: his sister, his parents, and a number that turned out (once Servaz had delved into the investigation report) to belong to a young married woman who had been having an affair with Joachim for several months.

At 15.28 Servaz turned to the location of the last calls made and received by Joachim Campos. These might enable them to retrace his steps.

‘A map,' he said. ‘I need a map of the central Pyrenees.'

Espérandieu fiddled on his keyboard and opened Google Maps.

‘Here's your map.'

Servaz looked at the screen.

‘Can't you make it a bit bigger?'

Espérandieu moved the vertical cursor down and the territory covered by the map grew larger while the distances between the villages shrank.

‘A little bit further south and east,' said Servaz.

His assistant complied.

‘There,' said Servaz, putting his finger on the spot.

Espérandieu looked at the spot indicated.
La Pergola.

‘Yes. And so what?'

‘There's the restaurant, and there's the last transmitter that recorded Joachim Campos's mobile. It's thirty kilometres from the restaurant,
but in the opposite direction from his house. A witness claims to have seen someone resembling Joachim in his Mercedes near the restaurant roughly half an hour before the transmitter recorded him passing by, in the company of two men. Assuming the witness was right, this means that Campos wasn't heading home.'