Irene Read online

  “When did you last see her?”

  “She left on Saturday.”

  “And is it normal for her not to come home?”

  “Well, no, actually,” says José.

  And at that moment José realises they know something he doesn’t, that the worst is yet to come and that it will come soon. He glances straight ahead at Louis, and then looks down at Camille. Suddenly Camille is no longer a midget, his is the terrible face of death itself.

  “You know where she is, don’t you …”

  “She’s been murdered, José. We found her body this morning in an apartment in Courbevoie.”

  Only now do they realise that young José is genuinely devastated, that while she was alive Évelyne lived here with him, that he loved her even if she was a prostitute, that she slept here in this room with him. Camille sees the young man’s face crumple, etched with the bewilderment and the grief of true tragedy.

  “Who did it?” José asks.

  “We don’t know yet. That’s why we’re here, José. We need to know what she was doing there.”

  José shakes his head. He has no idea. An hour later, Camille knows everything there is to know about José and Évelyne and the little working arrangement that led this rather shrewd girl to get herself chopped to pieces by a psychotic stranger.

  18

  Évelyne Rouvray was quick on the uptake. Having been arrested once, she quickly realises she is on a slippery slope and she has only to look at her mother to know that life is about to go downhill, and fast. As for drugs, though she is a user, she is careful to remain a high-functioning addict. She turns tricks at the Porte de la Chapelle and is savvy enough that when clients offer to pay double to do it without a condom, she tells them to fuck off. A few weeks after her arrest, José breezes into her life. They move into the flat on the rue Fremontel together and get themselves online. Évelyne spends a couple of hours a day at the computer looking for clients, she only does out calls and José always drives her to the meeting place and waits. He plays pinball in the nearest café. José is not really a pimp. He knows that in their little business venture, Évelyne is the boss, she is organised and very careful. Until now. A lot of clients ask to meet up in hotels. This is what happened last week. She met the john at a Mercure hotel. When she came back, she didn’t say much about the client other than that he was a friendly guy, not pervy, and stinking rich. In fact, he had suggested they meet up again a couple of days later. A threesome this time, he left it to Évelyne to find the second girl. His only stipulation was that she be about the same height and the same age. And he’s got a thing for big tits. So Évelyne phoned Josiane Debeuf, a girl she met down at the Porte de la Chapelle; it’s an all-night job, the guy will be alone and he is offering a sizeable wad of cash – the equivalent of two days’ work. He gave her an address in Courbevoie. José drove the two of them there. As they came into the deserted housing development they felt anxious. To make sure everything was above board, they agreed José would wait in the car until one of them waved to let him know it was alright. He was sitting in the car about twenty metres away when the client opened the door. With the light streaming from inside, he only saw him in silhouette. The man shook hands with the two girls. José waited for twenty minutes until Évelyne came to the window and waved. José was quite happy to leave them to it, he was planning to watch the Paris Saint-Germain match on Canal Plus.

  As they left José Riveiro’s apartment, Camille asked Louis to put together a file on the second victim, Josiane Debeuf, aged twenty-one. It should be easy to find information on her. The working girls on the Périphérique were usually known to the police.

  19

  Finding Irène hale and healthy, lying on the sofa watching television, her hands resting on her belly, a broad smile on her lips, Camille realised that since morning his mind had been swirling with images of dismembered women.

  “Are you O.K.?” she asked, seeing him appear with a heavy file under his arm.

  “Yes … I’m fine.”

  To change the subject, he laid a hand on her stomach and asked, “So, is the baby kicking up a storm in there?”

  Hardly had he said the words than the “Nine O’Clock News” came on, with footage of the identité judiciaire van slowly pulling away from the rue Félix-Faure in Courbevoie.

  By the time they showed up, there was precious little for the T.V. crews to film, so there were shots of the entrance to the apartment from every conceivable angle, closed doors, the last forensics officers leaving the scene, a close-up of the shuttered windows. The accompanying voiceover adopted the solemn tones reserved for national disasters. This alone told Camille that the media had no intention of letting the story drop without good reason. For a split second, he expected a government minister to be formally charged.

  There was lengthy footage of the plastic bags. It was not every day that one saw so many of them. The reporter stressed how little was known about the “terrible tragedy at Courbevoie”.

  Irène said nothing. She looked at her husband, who had just appeared on screen. Emerging from the apartment at the end of the day, Camille had simply repeated what he had said some hours earlier. But this time he was on film. Surrounded by a circle of boom microphones, he had been shot from above as though to highlight the strangeness of the situation. Thankfully, the story had been late in reaching the news desks.

  “They clearly didn’t have much time to edit the piece,” Irène said in a professional tone.

  The images confirmed her evaluation. The footage of Camille was scrappy, they had kept only the best parts.

  “Two young women whose identities have not yet been confirmed have been found dead. We are dealing with a … particularly savage crime.” (“What was I thinking, saying something so stupid!” Camille wondered.) “Juge Deschamps has been appointed investigating magistrate in the case. That’s all I have to say for the moment. I’d be grateful if you could allow us to get on with our work …”

  “Poor baby,” Irène said when the news story was over.

  After dinner, Camille pretended to take an interest in what was on television, then he leafed through a couple of magazines before taking some papers from his desk and, pen in hand, glanced through them until finally Irène said, “You’d be better off getting some work done. It might relax you …” She smiled. “Will you be late?”

  “Not at all – I’ll just quickly look over this file and then I’ll come to bed.”

  20

  It was 11 p.m. when Camille laid File No. 01/12587 on his desk. It was a thick sheaf of paper. He removed his glasses and slowly rubbed his eyelids. It was a gesture he had always enjoyed. Having been blessed as a child with excellent eyesight, he had sometimes been impatient for the day when he too would do it. In fact, there were two distinct versions of the gesture. In the first, the glasses were removed with a sweeping gesture of the right hand, the head turning slightly to the right as though to add a finishing touch. The second, a more refined version of the first, was accompanied by an enigmatic smile and, when perfectly executed, the glasses were removed, with understated awkwardness, by the left hand so that the right could be held out to the visitor for whom the gesture had been made, like an artistic performance intended as a greeting. In this second version, the left hand removed the glasses and set them down within reach, then massaged the bridge of the nose between thumb and middle finger with the index pressed lightly against the forehead. In this version the eyes remained closed. The gesture was intended to be interpreted as a moment of relief after a long period of intense concentration (a brief sigh could be added if desired). It was the sign of an intellectual gradually – very gradually – growing old.

  *

  Long experience of reports, court records and witness statements had taught Camille to quickly navigate unwieldy case files.

  This case had begun with an anonymous call. Camille flicked to the relevant statement: “There’s been a murder. Tremblay-en-France. The rubbish tip on the rue Garn
ier.” The killer clearly had his little tics. It’s amazing how quickly people develop a routine.

  The repetition was clearly as significant as the words themselves. The formulation was simple, calculated, purely informative, making it clear there was no confusion, no panic, no effect whatsoever. And the fact that this formulation had been repeated was not inadvertent. In fact, it spoke volumes about the self-control – whether real or imagined – of the murderer acting as emissary for his own crimes.

  The victim in the Tremblay case had soon been identified as Manuela Constanza, a 24-year-old prostitute of Spanish origin who turned tricks in a seedy hotel on the corner of the rue Blondel. Her pimp, Henri Lambert, known as Lard-ass Lambert – fifty-one years old, with seventeen arrests and four convictions, two of them for living off immoral earnings – had immediately been taken into custody. Lard-ass Lambert did some rapid calculations and decided to confess to being involved in the robbery of a shopping centre in Toulouse on November 21, 2001, which cost him eight months without parole but gave him a solid alibi for the time of the murder. Camille went on leafing through the file.

  A series of extraordinarily detailed black and white photographs, then suddenly: a young woman, her body cut in half at the waist.

  First photograph: the naked lower half of the mutilated body. The legs splayed. A large hunk of flesh has been ripped from the left thigh and a long gash, the blood already black, extends from the waist to the genitals. From their position, it is clear that both legs have been broken above the knee. A close-up of one toe shows a fingerprint in black ink made using a rubber stamp. The killer’s signature. Exactly the same as the one at the apartment in Courbevoie.

  Second photograph: the upper half of the body. The breasts are covered with cigarette burns. The right breast has been sliced, attached to the body only by a few shreds of skin. The tip of the left breast has been slashed. The wounds on both breasts cut to the bone. It is clear that the young woman was trussed up. The deep marks and burns caused by thick ropes are still visible.

  Third photograph: a close up of the head. It is hideous. The face is little more than a gaping wound, the nose is deeply embedded in the skull, the mouth has been slashed from ear to ear with a razor. The face seems to stare out, grinning hideously. The teeth are broken. All that remains is this perverse mockery of a smile. Camille can hardly bear to look. The girl had dark hair of the kind writers like to describe as raven black.

  Camille is gasping for breath. He feels a wave of nausea. He looks up, studies the room around him, then bends once more to study the photo. He feels a certain closeness to this young woman who has been hacked in two. He remembers a phrase used by one of the reporters: “This grinning rictus was the ultimate atrocity.” The razor cuts begin precisely at the corners of the mouth and extend in a curve to just beneath the earlobes.

  Camille puts down the photos, opens the window and for a long moment he stares out at the rooftops and the street below. The Tremblay murder was committed eighteen months ago, but there is nothing to suggest that it was the first. Or that it will be the last. The question now was, how many more victims might come to light? Camille was caught between relief and anxiety.

  From a technical point of view, there was something reassuring about the way in which the victims had been killed. It neatly corresponded to the classic profile of a psychopath, which was a bonus for the investigation. What was most worrying about the Courbevoie murders was the crime scene itself. Though the killings had clearly been premeditated, there were too many incongruous details: expensive objects left behind, the curious staging of the crime scene, a rather American exoticism, the telephone with no line out … Camille began to delve through the various reports in the file.

  An hour later, his worry had found reason to grow and blossom. The murder in Tremblay-en-France had also been characterised by a number of unknowns, and he mentally began to make a list. There was no shortage of strange details. It was immediately apparent that the hair of the victim, Manuela Constanza, was extraordinarily clean. Forensics indicated that it had been washed using a commonly available apple-scented shampoo about two hours before the body was discovered and consequently post mortem, since the girl had been dead for at least eight hours. But it was difficult to imagine a murderer mutilating a young girl, hacking her body in two and then taking the trouble to wash her hair. Several of her internal organs were missing. There was no trace of the intestines, liver, stomach or gall-bladder. Camille felt that this rather fetishistic aspect of collecting trophies did not quite square with the initial profile of the psychopath. He would have to wait until tomorrow and the autopsy results on the Courbevoie murders to know whether on this occasion there were organs missing too.

  The presence of the fake fingerprint in both cases meant there could be little doubt that they were dealing with the same man.

  There was one discrepancy: there were no signs that the Tremblay victim had been sexually assaulted. The autopsy found evidence consistent with consensual sexual activity in the week preceding death, though from the sperm samples it was impossible to determine whether she had been intimate with her killer.

  The Tremblay victim had been hit using a whip, something that in principle might connect the two crimes, but the autopsy report described the blows as “slight”, of the sort indulged in by couples into S.&M.

  A common link: the girl in Tremblay had been killed in a manner that several of the reports described as “brutal” (both legs had been broken with a blunt weapon like a baseball bat, she had been tortured for something like forty-eight hours before death, the corpse had been dismembered using a butcher’s knife) but the care with which the killer had drained the body of blood, washed it thoroughly and returned it to society as clean as a new pin was inconsistent with the gruesome glee with which the killer in Courbevoie had spattered walls and ceilings, taking obvious delight in seeing blood flow.

  Camille picked up the photographs again. It was impossible to become inured to this ghastly smile which somehow called to mind the severed head nailed to the wall. Camille was overcome by a wave of tiredness. He closed the file, turned out the light and went to join Irène.

  *

  At about 2.30 a.m., he was still wide awake. Pensively he stroked Irène’s belly with his small, chubby hand. Irène’s belly was a miracle. He watched her sleep, this woman whose scent filled him just as she seemed to fill this room, to fill his whole life. Sometimes love really was that simple.

  Sometimes, as tonight, he would gaze at her, seized by the terrible feeling of this miracle. Camille found Irène incredibly beautiful. But was she really beautiful? It was a question he had asked himself twice. The first time when they had had dinner together three years earlier. Irène had been wearing a midnight-blue dress buttoned from throat to hem, the sort of dress that men cannot help but imagine unbuttoning, which is precisely why women wear them. Pinned to the breast was a simple gold brooch.

  At the time he remembered something he had read long ago, something about “the ridiculous penchant of men for demure blondes”. Irène had a sensual beauty that gave the lie to such a thought. Was Irène beautiful? Yes.

  The second time he had asked himself this question was seven months ago: Irène had been wearing the same dress, only the jewellery was different, she now wore the brooch Camille had given her on their wedding day. She was wearing make-up.

  “Are you going out?” Camille had asked when he got home.

  In fact it was not so much a question as a probing statement, something particular to him which dated from the time he had believed that his relationship with Irène was one of those interludes which life has the good grace to offer a man once in a while, and the good sense to take away again.

  “No,” Irène had said, “I’m not going out.”

  Her work at the editing studio left little time to make dinner. As for Camille, his working day was dictated by the sorrows of the world; he arrived home late and left early.

  “You are extre
mely beautiful, Madame Verhœven,” Camille said, placing a hand on her breast.

  “A little aperitif first,” said Irène, slipping from his embrace.

  “Of course. So, what are we celebrating?” asked Camille.

  “I have news.”

  “What sort of news?”

  “Just news.”

  Irène sat next to him and took his hand.

  “Looks as though it’s good news.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “I’m not completely sure. I’d rather the news had come on a day when you didn’t seem so preoccupied.”

  “No, no, I’m just tired,” Camille protested, stroking her hand by way of apology. “I just need a good night’s sleep.”

  “The good news is that I’m not tired, but I’d happily go to bed early too.”

  Camille smiled. The day had been measured out in stab wounds, difficult arrests, screaming and shouting in the offices of the brigade criminelle, one vast gaping wound.

  But Irène was expert at making things right. She knew how to boost his confidence, how to take his mind off things. She talked about the studio, about the film she was editing (“complete rubbish, you wouldn’t believe how bad it is”). The conversation, the warmth of the apartment, the tiredness of the day slipping away. Camille felt a drowsy contentment welling up inside him. He was no longer listening to her words; the sound of her voice was enough. Irène’s voice.

  “O.K.,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

  She was about to get up, then suddenly seemed to remember something.

  “Two things, before I forget. Three things, actually.”

  “Shoot,” Camille said, draining his glass.

  “Françoise has invited us to dinner on the 13th. Does that work?”

  “Works for me,” Camille said after a moment’s thought.