Talking to Ghosts Read online

  Hervé Le Corre

  TALKING TO GHOSTS

  Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

  First published in the French language as Les Coeurs déchiquetés

  by Éditions Payot & Rivages, Paris, 2009

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2009, Editions Payot & Rivages

  English translation copyright © 2014 by Frank Wynne

  This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme

  The moral right of Hervé Le Corre to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Frank Wynne asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB) 978 0 85705 206 3

  ISBN (TPB) 978 0 85705 207 0

  ISBN (Ebook) 978 1 78087 304 6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk and

  www.maclehosepress.com

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  Glossary

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The judicial system in France is fundamentally different to that in the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. Rather than the adversarial system, where police investigate, and the role of the courts is to act as an impartial referee between prosecution and defence, in the French inquisitorial system the judiciary work with the police on the investigation, appointing an independent juge d’instruction entitled to question witnesses, interrogate suspects, and oversee the police investigation, gathering evidence, whether incriminating or otherwise. If there is sufficient evidence, the case is referred to the procureur – the public prosecutor who decides whether to bring charges. The juge d’instruction plays no role in the eventual trial and is prohibited from adjudicating future cases involving the same defendant.

  The French have two national police forces: the police nationale (formerly called the Sûreté), a civilian police force with jurisdiction in cities and large urban areas, and the gendarmerie nationale, a branch of the French Armed Forces, responsible both for public safety and for policing the towns with populations of less than 20,000. Since the gendarmerie rarely has the resources to conduct complex investigations, the police nationale maintains regional criminal investigations services (police judiciaire) analogous to the British C.I.D.; they also oversee armed response units (R.A.I.D.).

  GLOSSARY

  Brigade anti-criminalité – equivalent to the U.K. Homicide and Serious Crime Squad, the brigade handles murders, kidnappings and assassinations.

  Brigade des mineurs – the police department dealing with young offenders and young victims of crime.

  Brigadier – the rank in the gendarmerie equivalent to Sergeant.

  Commandant – the rank equivalent to Detective Chief Inspector (U.K.).

  Commissaire divisionnaire – the rank equivalent to Chief Superintendent (U.K.)/Police Chief (U.S.), though comprising both an administrative and an investigative role.

  C.R.S. (Compagnie républicaine de sécurité) – the French riot police infamous for their uncompromising methods.

  D.D.A.S.S. (Direction départementale des affaires sanitaires et sociales) – the equivalent of the U.K. Department for Work and Pensions.

  D.S.T. (Direction de la surveillance du territoire) – the French equivalent of the old UK Border Agency, or of the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S.A.

  G.I.G.N. (Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale) – a special operations unit of the French Armed Forces, which forms part of the gendarmerie nationale, and is trained to perform counter-terrorist and hostage-rescue missions in France.

  Identité judiciare – the forensics department of the police nationale.

  Juge d’instruction – the rank of “investigating judge”, a role somewhat similar to that of an American District Attorney. He or she is addressed as monsieur or madame le juge.

  Maréchal des logis chef – the rank in the gendarmerie roughly equivalent to that of Staff Sergeant.

  Procureur – the title comparable to Crown Prosecutor in the U.K. He or she is addressed as magistrat.

  R.A.I.D. (Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion) – the special operations tactical unit of the police nationale.

  R.G. (Direction centrale des renseignements généraux) – the French Intelligence Service.

  S.A.M.U. (Service d’aide medicale urgente) – the French ambulance service.

  The ravaged hearts that talk to ghosts

  Leo Ferré

  But I have wept too much, it’s true! The Dawns are heart-rending.

  Every moon appals and every sun is bitter:

  Acrid love has swelled me with heady torpors.

  Let my keel split! Let me founder in the sea!

  Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”

  Prologue

  Often in the morning at about 11.15 he would park his car near the school, on the far side of the street, since from there he had a better view of the deserted playground with its chestnut trees and the classroom windows on the first floor. He could make out brightly coloured cut-out figures stuck to the windows, Christmas trees, animals and little men. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of the teacher, or a child’s hand going up, and then his heart would pound, he would feel a dry bitterness in his throat, he would swallow hard and force himself to blink, his eyelids stinging from staring for so long.

  The first floor had four classrooms, but it was in the one with the fantastical menagerie galloping across its windows that Pablo had sat. Third desk, middle row, in the CM1 classroom. It was a nice room, its walls papered with children’s drawings, modern art posters, maps and photographs from all over the world, forming a sort of encyclopaedic fresco around the children.

  One of Pablo’s drawings was pinned up on the back wall. He had seen it when he came into the classroom, afterwards. Pablo was always drawing. People said he was gifted. Painted on a square sheet of paper a metre across, you could easily see that it was a safari scene with lions, elephants, giraffes and antelopes … Two 4 x 4s were hurtling through the yellow grass in the middle of
the painting; a huge blue rhinoceros was overturning a third vehicle with its horn, tossing its occupants into the air, spreadeagled like little frogs. He had immediately gone closer to appreciate the details, and couldn’t help smiling because the boy had given each of the hunters a particular expression – happy, terrified or gormless – and drawn beautiful eyes for the animals, some gentle, some savage.

  He had smiled, then turned around to dry his eyes and stifle the sobs racking his chest. The following day the teacher had come to his house and handed him the drawing, rolled up like a parchment and tied with a red ribbon. He and Ana had managed to smile that evening as they pored over the painting spread out on the coffee table in the sitting room. They had run their fingers gently over the colours their son had painted, sometimes with bold, determined brushstrokes, sometimes with painstaking care to capture a zebra’s stripes, for example, or give a hunter a strange hat with a blue feather. Afterwards they had fallen asleep on the sofa, exhausted by tears and helpless attempts to comfort each other. Waking in the dead of night, they had slipped into bed but been unable to get back to sleep, both isolated by exhaustion.

  At 11.30 the gates would open, and the children who didn’t take lunch in the canteen would start to trickle out. Parents would be waiting for them, mothers mostly, some of whom took charge of a whole brood of kids and slowly walked away surrounded by skipping or whining midgets. There were some men waiting, too, for the most part those practising the art of being a grandfather. Frozen, his hands clamped to the steering wheel, the man in the car would watch all this. Lying next to him on the passenger seat, hidden beneath a navy blue cloth, he had placed a 9mm pistol with a 15-round magazine, the first round already engaged in the barrel.

  He kept a keen eye on the children who were unaccompanied by an adult as they walked away from the school. In his mind he urged them to hurry up, to run home while he studied the passers-by – there were few – and the cars that had to slow for the speed bump. He was tense, ready to jump from his own car, weapon in hand, and press the muzzle to the forehead of any guy he saw acting suspiciously around one of the kids, or to open fire on any car that stopped next to a child.

  And then, when nothing happened, he drove off again, baffled with rage and grief, and headed back to work where he forced himself to deal with the violence of others which was everywhere, engulfing him, terrifying him, seeping unstoppably into his mind and pooling in the innermost recesses of his brain, adding to his inconsolable grief; nothing, it seemed, could staunch the flow of calls to the switchboard and the station, or all the screams, the blood, the contusions and the deaths those calls announced, all this endless misery, and it seemed to him that he could smell the rank sweat of a grubby, sick society the moment he set foot in the brand-new police station that backed on to the Chartreuse cemetery, a pompous white fortress where dark destinies were played out, tragedies enacted without footlights or curtain. It did not stick in his throat like the prison smell of men and burnt fat, no, it was more subtle, more insidious, filling his head until it nearly split.

  The man’s name was Pierre Vilar. His son Pablo didn’t like having lunch in the canteen so as soon as he and Ana had decided that he was old enough – being almost ten – safely to walk the 400 metres from school to the house, they’d given in to him. A neighbour, Madame Lucien, looked after him and made his lunch. Pablo loved Madame Lucien and probably loved her boxer dog, Billy, even more. She would often go and fetch Pablo, when it rained, for instance. Sometimes Vilar or Ana would arrange to pick him up. It was seldom that the boy had to make the journey alone.

  On 20 March 2000, a Tuesday, Vilar had been supposed to collect him, but he had been held up at the station and then there had been the accident on the boulevard: a fender-bender, one person slightly injured, he’d found out later, the sort of traffic jam you’ve forgotten about come evening. Vilar had pulled up outside the school at 11.38.

  When he rang the doorbell at Madame Lucien’s and saw her face grow pale and her eyes widen with the question that exploded in her head at the same instant as in his – “Pablo’s not with you?” – he started to run towards the school following the same route he had taught Pablo twenty times over, but he did not find him in the street or at the school where there was a remote chance he could have been kept back for some minor misdemeanour or injury. He was clutching at straws, really, so as not to sink into panic, but even then he realised, he knew, in spite of the investigation that was immediately launched, an investigation that went on all day, went on for days, for weeks, without turning up anything despite the huge resources and dedication the police put into the search for a fellow officer’s son. He knew. But because people may know something and still not believe it, it felt as though the ground opened up beneath his feet that day, a yawning chasm that threatened to swallow him, and he was standing on a bridge of ice above it, sometimes drawn to the abyss.

  Pablo had vanished on the corner of a street where a car had turned, a car with metallic paint, grey maybe, or green, or sky-blue, a Peugeot, or maybe a Citroën, driven by a man – on this last point the four witnesses agreed.

  After that, Pierre and Ana forgot what it meant to sleep, to eat, to smile, to love each other. At night they collapsed onto the mattress and sank into a mindless stupor from which they awoke exhausted and with aching heads. They shovelled food into their stomachs and digested it. Their faces became cardboard masks, animated by involuntary, polite, expected expressions, and then gradually etched with deep wrinkles like shifting fault lines.

  They no longer thought to look at each other, to whisper pointless tender words, to reassure each other even though they did not believe in reassurance, to lie to themselves just for the pleasure of tasting the lie’s illusory flavour, delicious and deceptive like the taste of an acid drop, merely so they could stay upright a little longer. They no longer touched, no longer knew the taste of each other’s tears on their faces, forgot to hug each other to stifle their sobs and calm them.

  They could not find each other, because Pablo had not been found.

  Vilar got into the habit of going back to the school, as soon as he could, in the irrational hope of surprising the kidnapper, of seeing him, seeing his face appear on the street or in a car. He will come. He will be there, hunched in his car seat, and when the kids come out he will start the car and he will waylay one of them. He will do it again. And I will be there.

  He knew this vision was lunatic, it was madness. It was his job to know. He knew how much his obsession was damaging him too, felt himself cracking a little more every time, felt his strength being sapped. But on the rare occasions when he found the willpower to give up his stake-out he felt a deep, all-pervading, exhausting pain, an aching absence that overwhelmed him, a pain he sometimes wanted to dig out of his body with a knife. He tried to talk about it to those around him, but he saw that he frightened people, saw them back away too, from this contagious evil that might rouse the fears coiled in the back of their minds like hibernating snakes.

  Two years later, during a difficult arrest, he opened fire on a suspect. The bullet lodged between two vertebrae. It was successfully removed, and the victim benefited by having his case dismissed and being awarded six months in a nursing home. The internal investigation proved beyond doubt that the shooting was not justified by any mitigating circumstance, by imminent threat or legitimate self-defence. The policeman’s nerve had probably failed him. Vilar admitted that the guy, a stocky thug with a long rap sheet who was known always to carry a weapon and shoot at the first sign of trouble, and was suspected of having gunned down two security guards and a policeman, wasn’t worth the bullet he’d taken. The policeman’s grave error was solemnly condemned but the inquiry was unwilling to punish him further, given the tragedy he had lived through, was living through still, if he could be said to be living. He was compulsorily referred to a psychiatrist, but after several sessions the two men acknowledged that nothing could be said or done that would make it possible for him to
accept the unacceptable, to ease this bereavement without there being found a body. They parted courteously, each thanking the other for what little they had learned.

  Vilar swore to himself that he would never again carry a gun on duty, in spite of the regulations.

  Except when he came to park outside Pablo’s school and stalk shadows.

  1

  Victor plunged into the darkness of the shuttered house, struggling to close the door behind him as though repelling some intruder trying to force his way across the overheated threshold. When he had finally managed to shut out the blinding sunlight, he sighed with relief. He slipped off his little red rucksack, the straps pulling at the neck of his T-shirt, baring a thin, tanned shoulder that he quickly covered up again. Without bending to untie the laces, he kicked off his trainers and smelled his bare, sweating feet. The cold tiles made his toes curl. He walked gingerly, leaving a trail of damp footprints that instantly faded, heading for the kitchen which reeked of stale tobacco smoke and bleach. Dust swirled in two shafts of sunlight streaming through the venetian blinds. He trailed his hand through the warm gold dust, sowing silent, microscopic confusion. In the fridge he found a can of cold cola and opened it, closing his eyes at the hiss of carbon dioxide, drinking in long gulps, leaning back against a cupboard, then screwing his face up and burping suddenly. He stepped back into the hall which ran the length of the house connecting the two small gardens. He noticed that the door to his mother’s room was ajar. That meant she was alone, and he called out to her as he approached.

  His dull, muffled voice met with a smothering silence that absorbed it like water. She must be asleep. She often took a nap in the heat of the day when she was at home. He pushed open the door and at first could see nothing in the dim light that came through the closed shutters. He could smell nothing but a musky odour of sweat mingled with lily of the valley perfume. He saw the rumpled bed, the sheets and blankets piled on the mattress. He saw the torn curtain hanging by just two or three rings from the rod. He saw the panties on the floor, the small television upended.