The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (17 page)

Manfred asked Mlle Givskov to close up the bank and left early. He was tempted to nip round to Le Pot for a quick glass, but the thought of running into Lemerre deterred him. He could not think of another suitable establishment. Instead he stopped off in a grocer's shop and bought two bottles of red wine. Apart for his usual nightcap, which he took only to help him sleep, he did not make a habit of drinking in his apartment. There was something wretched about drinking at home. The bottles clanked noisily in the brown paper bag in which the grocer had placed them. Manfred removed one of them and slipped it into the outer pocket of his raincoat.

As he approached the apartment building, he was surprised to see Gorski emerge from the entrance. He looked around, as if to ascertain whether anyone had seen him, and started to walk in Manfred's direction. Manfred did not know what to do. It was too late to cross the road and there was no suitable place to conceal himself. In any case, he would not want Gorski to think that he was trying to avoid him. He had no choice but to
keep going. The detective gave no indication of having seen him. Then, when they were no more than five metres apart, Gorski nodded curtly and walked straight past him. Manfred continued to his apartment. If Gorski had not wished to speak to him, what was he doing in the apartment building? Manfred placed the two bottles on his kitchen table. He opened one and poured himself a glass. He stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the play park. Alice's silver sports car was parked in its usual place.

G
ORSKI WAS SITTING
in the communal area of the station behind the reception window, leafing through his interview notes. He didn't like to closet himself in his office. It gave the impression that he was aloof and he did not like the idea that the other cops might be talking about him. Some of his colleagues still resented Gorski's status as Ribéry's protégé. All that had been twenty years before, but his reputation for currying favour with authority had stuck, at least with the older members of the force.

Schmitt was manning the desk. He had a newspaper spread in front of him on the counter. Gorski had on a number of occasions requested that he refrain from reading his newspaper in view of the public, but Schmitt simply ignored him and eventually he had let it drop. By the time Gorski joined the station, Schmitt had already been confined to desk duties due to some ill-defined medical complaint. He made no secret of his disdain for the young detective. Gorski for his part would have dearly loved to get rid of him. He fantasised at length about forcing him into retirement. He had the power to do so, but he lacked the appetite for confrontation. In any case, such an action would only provoke further resentment among the fraternity of older officers.

Without looking up from his paper, Schmitt said, ‘There was
a call from Strasbourg. They pulled a floater out of the river.' He mentioned it as if was a matter of no consequence which had simply slipped his mind.

‘Sorry?' said Gorski. He had been in the station twenty minutes before Schmitt decided to share this piece of news.

‘They said they fished a body out of the Rhine.'

‘What kind of body?' said Gorski. He made no attempt to hide his irritation. It was not uncommon for bodies to be found in the Rhine, but even Schmitt could hardly have failed to register the potential importance of the information.

‘A female, they didn't say much.'

‘No age, no description, no cause of death?'

Schmitt shrugged. ‘I got the impression they'd only just pulled her out.'

‘But you didn't ask?'

Schmitt exhaled noisily through his moustache, as if the thought hadn't crossed his mind.

‘They left a number.'

He made a show of searching for it amid the debris on the counter. He found it on a scrap of paper and held it up. Gorski snatched it and went to his office to make the call. He sat down and went through what he would say. He disliked calling the stations in the city. Even the receptionists never failed to make him feel like a provincial bumpkin. Not that anything was ever said. It was a matter of tone. But there was no getting around making the call. A woman answered.

‘Inspector Gorski of Saint-Louis calling for Inspector Lambert.'

And there it was: ‘Sorry, from where?'

‘Saint-Louis, Haut-Rhin,' Gorski repeated.

The receptionist connected him to the extension. Gorski had met Lambert on a number of occasions, but he never seemed to remember him.

Lambert picked up. ‘Georges, how are you?'

Gorski could not help feeling gratified that he remembered
his first name and had greeted him in a friendly manner.

‘I hear you've got something I might be interested in,' he said.

‘Maybe,' said Lambert.

‘Do you have any further information about the remains?' Gorski regretted the formal manner in which he phrased this. It ruined the affable tone with which the conversation had begun.

‘Young female, that's all. They only pulled her out a couple of hours ago. She's on a slab in the mortuary. Come up and take a look if you like.'

Ten minutes later Gorski was heading north on the A35. He was excited. He was no expert in such matters, but he understood that it took a few days for gasses to form in the stomach of a corpse and bring it to the surface. The fact that the body had been found one hundred kilometres downstream meant nothing. Bodies often drifted great distances before they snagged on a branch or caught a current and washed up in the shallows. Gorski was equally pleased by the way Lambert had spoken to him and immediately invited him to accompany him to the mortuary to view the body. All being well, by the end of the day, he could have a time and cause of death, perhaps even some other forensic evidence.

The landscape between Saint-Louis and Strasbourg was flat and monotonous. The road was quiet and Gorski used the drive to gather his thoughts about Adèle. Until Alex Ackermann had turned up, she had remained an enigma to him.

That first night, the couple had crossed the border to Basel where they had gone to a bar, well known to Gorski's Swiss colleagues as a haunt of the alternative scene. Ackermann admitted he had taken Adèle there in an attempt to impress her. They had a few drinks and he bought a small quantity of hashish from a man whose name he claimed not to remember. Gorski had not pressed him on the point. He was not interested in a small-time dope dealer and he wanted the boy to feel that he could speak freely. Once the youth had confessed this transgression,
he visibly relaxed. He explained that it was because of this that he had not come forward sooner. The Adèle that Ackermann described was quite different from the sullen waitress of the Restaurant de la Cloche. While she had revealed little about herself, she was talkative and worldly. Ackermann confessed that he had felt a little out of his depth. It was hard to reconcile the two pictures of Adèle, but Gorski reminded himself how little he knew about what his own daughter got up to when she was out with her friends. Perhaps she too went to disreputable bars and smoked marijuana. Ackermann had struck him as a pleasant enough young man whose primary concern was that his parents did not hear about his activities. Had he met him in the company of Clémence, he would not have been overly concerned.

Gorski negotiated the one-way system around the station in Rue de la Nuée Bleue with some difficulty, eventually leaving his car a few streets away. Lambert came down to the foyer without delay and shook Gorski warmly by the hand. He was a tall handsome man with sandy hair and pale blue eyes. He was wearing an expensive well-cut suit. For once, Gorski was pleased to be smartly turned out.

‘How's the case?' he asked.

‘We're following up a few leads,' said Gorski. He did not want to admit that he was getting nowhere.

‘That bad, eh?' His tone was sympathetic rather than mocking.

‘I could certainly do with a body,' said Gorski.

Lambert suggested that they take his car to the mortuary. He asked Gorski a few more questions about the case, but when it became apparent that he had little or nothing to go on, he dropped the subject. Gorski was embarrassed. He wondered if it was his own incompetence that had resulted in the lack of progress. He would have liked to ask Lambert's advice. He would have dealt with far more cases of this nature than Gorski. But he did not do so and the final minutes of the journey were passed in silence. Lambert parked his BMW in a restricted area outside the mortuary and strode past the reception area.
He appeared to know the corridors of the building well. He marched along so quickly Gorski almost had to run to keep up. They were greeted by a technician in a white coat and Lambert explained why they were there. When the technician glanced questioningly in Gorski's direction, Lambert introduced him as if he had forgotten momentarily that he was there. The technician led them to a bank of stainless steel doors. He told them that the post-mortem would not take place until later that evening, but they were welcome to attend. Gorski hoped that would not be necessary. In his early days as a detective, he had, out of a sense of bravado, volunteered to attend the autopsy of a suicide. Much to the amusement of the pathologist and his assistant, he had thrown up only minutes into the procedure. News of the incident mysteriously filtered back to the station and for weeks afterwards he had had to endure his colleagues pretending to vomit into wastepaper baskets whenever he entered the room. The technician slid the drawer open. Gorski took a deep breath. It was immediately apparent that the body was not that of Adèle Bedeau. The girl was blonde and skinny. Her ribs showed through her skin. The flesh had taken on a greenish-grey hue. Lambert looked at Gorski, who shook his head. He felt nauseous.

‘Been dead a good couple of weeks, I'd say,' said the technician.

‘Sorry, pal,' said Lambert.

They drove back to the station in silence. Gorski felt that Lambert was embarrassed on his behalf, that he had shown his naivety by jumping in his car so hastily. He could easily have waited in Saint-Louis for a description of the body to be sent to him. Instead, he had got ahead of himself, like a child who couldn't wait to open his Christmas presents. On the drive to Strasbourg he had practically solved the crime in his head and got himself a transfer to the big city force in the process. Indeed, had he not partly raced here merely for the opportunity to rub shoulders with some big city cops, and so that later he would be able to mention in an offhand way to Céline that he had been up to Strasbourg?

Gorski and Lambert parted in the street. Lambert wished
him luck with the case and told him to get in touch if he needed anything. Gorski thanked him. They shook hands and Lambert disappeared back into the station.

Gorski took the longer route along the Rhine back to Saint-Louis. He drove slowly. He had no wish to return to the station and admit that his trip to Strasbourg had been a wild goose chase. He could already see the mocking expression on Schmitt's face. The brown water of the great river to his left moved at funereal pace. The crops in the fields to his right were cut to a stubble. There was a sweet smell of manure in the air. He felt deflated. The investigation was cold and he could see little chance of it taking a turn for the better. If it did, it would be a matter of good fortune rather than through any inspiration on his part. All avenues of investigation had been exhausted. There was only Manfred Baumann, but aside from the fact that he was lying, there was no real evidence to connect him to Adèle Bedeau's disappearance.

He pulled into a lay-by a little to the north of Saint-Louis and sat for some minutes, smoking. Then he got out and walked through the woods towards the clearing. As he trudged along the path he told himself that the clearing was as good a place as any to gather his thoughts, but there was more to it than that. As he took his usual seat on the fallen tree trunk, he wondered if a cop like Lambert would have made more progress with the case. His Strasbourg colleague would certainly have taken a more forceful line with Manfred Baumann, perhaps arresting him in the hope of forcing him into a confession. Or perhaps he would have staged some reconstruction of the events leading up to the girl's disappearance. Gorski's credo was that police work was a matter of routine, of following procedure, but he feared his scorn for speculation was nothing more than a defence against the suspicion that he was incapable of taking a more intuitive approach to his work. Twenty years ago, he had failed and now he was failing again. Yet he refused to countenance changing his methods. But had he not, in fact, returned to the clearing
because of the nagging feeling that there was some connection between the disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and the murder of Juliette Hurel? He had, as a matter of course, considered and rejected the notion. Yet the idea persisted. He carefully stubbed out his cigarette on the tree trunk and lit another.

Gorski loathed hunches. They were an excuse for ill-disciplined thinking, part of a vocabulary cops liked to use to cloak their work in mystique. Speculation led nowhere. One ‘what if' led to another and, before long, supposition was piled on pointless supposition. It was like the opening of a game of chess. After every move the permutations increased exponentially. Gorski had no inclination to lose himself in a pointless chain of conjecture, a chain which would in all likelihood turn out to be built on false premises. In any case, such thinking gave Gorski a headache. Yet his plodding adherence to empiricism had got him nowhere. And, had he not from the outset proceeded on the premise that Adèle Bedeau was dead, and more than that – that she had been murdered? It was a very basic assumption, but even now Gorski had no evidence to support it. Indeed, the very lack of evidence pointed to the opposite conclusion: that Adèle Bedeau was alive and had simply disappeared. Was this not why Gorski had become so excited when Schmitt had informed him of the body in the river? The assumption he had made had been vindicated. And in the process Gorski could applaud himself on the correctness of his instincts. He had already been congratulating himself on the drive to Strasbourg.

The air in the forest was cool and still. A woodpigeon cooed incessantly. Gorski cast his eyes up towards the foliage, but he could not see any birds. He drew on his cigarette. The ground was tinder dry. For a second Gorski saw the forest ablaze, the invisible birds around him suddenly taking to the skies to escape the flames. Then he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He started. He dreaded the idea of someone coming along to whom he might have to explain his presence. He looked over his shoulder. There was nobody there. Perhaps a bird or animal
had disturbed the undergrowth. He looked at his watch. It was only quarter past four. He could not go home. Clémence would be back from school and think it odd that he was in the house. These days he spent as little time as possible at home. He got up from the tree trunk and for no particular reason walked in the direction of the sound he had heard. There were some ripe blackberries in the bushes. He paused to pick some, snagging the sleeves of his jacket on the thorns. They were sweet and juicy. The flavour reminded him of the weeks he had spent working on a farm as a teenager. He pushed through the brushwood. After a while he came across an overgrown path.

Twenty minutes later he arrived at a brick wall, around three metres tall and veined with creepers. The pale yellow bricks were crumbling and much of the mortar had come loose, so that it appeared to be held up only by the ivy that grappled its way to the coving. The wall stretched some distance in either direction and Gorski could not step back far enough to see over it due to the dense bushes from which he had emerged. There was a wooden door. It had once been painted blue, but most of the paint had long since peeled off, leaving the wood exposed and rotting. The undergrowth reached halfway up the door and the hinges were covered with ancient cobwebs. It had clearly not been used for years. Nevertheless, Gorski stepped into the shrubbery and tried the rusty doorknob. It rattled uselessly in his hand. He contemplated scaling the wall. There were plenty of crevices that could serve as footholds, but the idea of arriving on someone's property in such an undignified manner did not appeal to him. Besides, he could not be sure the wall would not collapse under his weight.