Talking to Ghosts Read online

  Vilar sighed.

  “Knife attack. Multiple stab wounds. The guy probably died instantly, or pretty much. Heart or artery. I’m going to question the victim’s friend. The scene is contaminated, there’s been people trampling all over it; the only thing I can say for definite is that the body hasn’t been moved.”

  “Right, no surprise there. Assaults on a public roads are always shit. It’s not like we’re going to take samples of tarmac.”

  Vilar left them to deal with the body, climbed into the ambulance and asked the paramedic comforting the witness to leave them. The man climbed down without a word and lit a cigarette. The dead man’s friend, who was still shivering spasmodically, had been wrapped in one of those foil survival blankets that shimmer in the midst of a catastrophe like a silver gown at a society ball. The man was about fifty with grey, receding hair cropped close. His shirt and trousers were smeared with blood. The man’s broad shoulders, stocky build and thick neck reminded Vilar of a rugby forward. He wondered just how tall the man was.

  “Commandant Vilar. I just have a few questions. Would that be O.K.?”

  The man nodded. He still had not looked up. Pradeau, who had followed Vilar into the ambulance, produced a wallet with a sigh. His face was drawn, his eyelids heavy. Vilar tried to meet his gaze, to see how he was holding up, but Pradeau managed to avoid him.

  “His papers,” Pradeau said, nodding towards the man. “There were two guys and a girl. We’ve got their descriptions. The guy with the knife was tall, skinhead, earring, wearing combat trousers. The other guy …”

  “What did the girl look like?” Vilar said, turning towards the witness who was shivering where he sat.

  “Short, skinny, dyed red hair, wearing a black leather miniskirt and a chunky pair of Nikes.”

  “Are you sure of the brand?”

  The man shook his head, screwed up his face.

  “Um … no, what I meant was big trainers, you know? With those thick soles.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She tried to intervene, tried to calm them down, told her mates to quit it, said they were off their faces. She ran off when things got out of hand. She was long gone by the time they left, just after …” He fell silent and bit his lower lip. His eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand.

  Pradeau patted the man on the shoulder, shooting Vilar a look that might have been exhaustion or impatience, then quickly looked down at his pad, several pages of which were covered with scribbled notes.

  “That confirms the witness statement I’ve got here: a girl coming out of the station heading to school, she saw the whole thing, though at first she didn’t realise what was happening. The other witnesses showed up a few minutes later when the victim was on the ground, all they saw was the two guys running away. We’ve got cars patrolling between here, Les Capucins and La Victoire, I radioed in a rough description.”

  Vilar nodded. Pradeau added that Darien, the deputy procureur, had just shown up and was dealing with the girl. Vilar scarcely heard, focused as he was on the man huddled beneath his foil blanket, slowly rolling between his hands the tissue he had used to wipe his eyes. He let it fall at his feet, then touched his neck gingerly with his fingertips as though afraid he had broken or dislocated something. Vilar leaned towards him.

  According to his papers his name was Michel Vanini, born 1961 in Sainte-Livrade. Married with two daughters aged twenty-four and seventeen.

  In a weary voice, hoarse from tiredness and probably too much drinking and smoking, Vanini explained that four of them had gone out on the town to celebrate the end of a job laying cables in the Quartier du Lac. He was the foreman. They had been supposed to head back to Agen that day, but had ended up partying at a club called the Black Jack until getting on for 3 a.m. After they left the club, the two others had gone home to bed but he and the dead man, Kevin, had decided party a little longer since this was Kevin’s stag night, he was supposed to be marrying a girl called Vanessa; Vanini was distraught at the thought of how she would react. Vilar tried to distract him, asking where they had gone after the club. Vanini said they had been to a peepshow – not the one the victim had been killed outside, but one a bit further down the street on the corner of the cours de la Marne, they had only gone in for a laugh, you know, nothing sleazy, they had been working their arses off for two weeks straight, with no time off to go home to kiss the wife and kids, nothing but a breather on Sundays, but it had meant a lot of overtime and besides it was not as though they had a choice – their boss had been clear that they either took the job or they found work elsewhere, so yeah, they’d gone to chill out, there was no harm in that.

  The guy seemed to regain his confidence as he confided this, he looked up now, giving Vilar a defiant look that said hard-working labourers had a right to some downtime and searching the policeman’s vague, distant expression for that shrug of approval and support that men reserve for that kind of boys’ night out, probably thinking, Hey, you know what it’s like, it’s O.K. to look as long as you don’t touch, and the man, who a moment earlier had been devastated by his friend’s death, ventured a smile, and his heavyset rugby player’s frame relaxed.

  Vilar was tempted to ask whether the girl was pretty, what she had looked like, what she had done, whether Vanini thought she was younger or older than his own daughter and – while they were on the subject – whether he was planning to visit the peepshow next time he was in Bordeaux. He pictured the woman behind a pane of glass on that cramped, grubby podium and wondered whether she was Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, whether by now she was sleeping, exhausted, on some filthy mattress while her pimp and the peepshow owner divvied up the cash, or whether she was already round at her dealer’s, offering her services to save on the price of a fix.

  This ordinary, decent labourer and his friend considered the city at night to be one big playground, they probably knew nothing – or chose to know nothing – about the sufferings of the woman they were leering at, just as, in their exhausted state, they did not expect to run into some idiot off his face on drink or drugs, ready to plunge a knife into the heart of the first passing stranger who refused to give him what he wanted because, in that moment, he could not defer gratification even by a second and, in a fit of blind rage, would stab this stranger he suddenly thought of as his enemy. To Vanini, their night on the town was like a visit to the zoo, but the cages were open, and having been terrified that he might not make it out alive, he was now convinced the worst was over.

  Vilar wanted to take him down a peg or two. The man squirmed in his seat, perhaps eager to have done with all these pointless questions.

  “Tell me exactly how it happened.”

  “How what happened?”

  “What do you think? You think I’m looking for a detailed description of the arse of some girl at a peepshow? You don’t think there’s something more significant that’s happened since?”

  Vilar had raised his voice. Vanini took the words like a slap in the face, slumping back against the seat, his shoulders hunched.

  They had been coming out of a bar, having had one for the road before going home to hit the sack. They heard a voice behind them asking for a cigarette, and, turning around, they found themselves face to face with two young guys and a girl who was totally off her face, hardly able to stand on her skinny legs in her huge trainers. After that everything was a blur. Kevin rummages through his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, the little wiry guy snatches the pack and helps himself, Kevin gets angry and tries to grab the cigarettes back, then the guy headbutts Kevin and that’s when it all kicks off.

  There’s a fight, the girl screams, then suddenly a knife appears. The little guy lunges like it’s a sword, then waves the knife around as Kevin stumbles back against the sex-shop window, clutching his chest, blood seeping between his fingers, and then he slumps slowly to the ground and the wiry little guy is still calling him a bastard and a fucker, still waving the knife, while the tall guy tri
es to drag him off, saying they can’t hang around, that he’s killed him.

  Then his best friend is whimpering in his arms, the blood keeps pumping, he cannot staunch the flow, then suddenly the body feels so heavy he has to lay him down, let him go.

  Vanini quietly began to cry, his face distorted by grief, he gave a sharp, muted wail and his broad shoulders shook with sobs.

  Pradeau leaned towards Vilar, waiting until the man calmed down so that he could say something. With a nod, he confirmed that the story tallied with the other witness statements, then asked Vilar to come with him.

  “We’ve pretty much tracked them down,” he said. “All three are regulars in the local bars. They’re always hanging around the area. Tonight they were out playing the slots and getting hammered. The two guys are Jonathan and Cédric, the girl’s name is Coralie. They’ve got a place somewhere between Les Capucins and Saint-Michel. They were spotted coming out of a bar just behind the station. They’re not criminal masterminds, just three drunken arseholes who butcher some guy who happens to be walking on the wrong side of the street… ‘on the wild side’, like the man says.”

  Vilar looked at him blankly.

  “For fuck’s sake, you’ve heard of Lou Reed haven’t you? ‘Walk on the Wild Side’? It’s a song. It’s on ‘Transformer’. ”

  Since he knew Pradeau was quite capable of reeling off the name of the bassist and the sound engineer, and possibly even reciting the “special thanks” in the sleeve notes, Vilar raised a hand to interrupt him.

  “O.K., fine. So what about you? How are you holding up? You don’t look too hot.”

  “You and me both, if it comes to that. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately.”

  “You need to get laid once in a while.”

  “I try my best, but it’s not much fun out on your own, you know?”

  “I know. Anyway, while we’re waiting for Blue Velvet to re-form, why don’t you get on with taking statements from the man and the girl. Where is she, anyway?”

  Pradeau jerked his chin in her general direction.

  “Over by the fire engine. She’s a minor, we’re looking for her parents. I didn’t know you knew the classics.”

  “If it’s trickled down to you …”

  Vilar trailed off and looked at his watch. Not far from them, an ambulance started up and pulled away. The two technicians from l’Identité judiciaire were stowing their gear into a van.

  “I’ll leave the rest to you. I need to get back to the murder over in Bacalan. I suspect it’s going to be a lot more complicated than these three cowardly fuckwits who we’ll probably have tracked down by tomorrow. Give it a couple of days, and we’ll have them banged up. We’ve got all the information we need, it should be pretty straightforward.”

  “How’s the boy?” Pradeau said.

  Vilar shrugged.

  “O.K., I think. Physically, at least …”

  “Shit, a kid lying in a coma next to the rotting corpse of his mother … I can’t get it out of my head. It’s not as if we’re not used to wading through sordid, pathetic shit, but a case like that, it’s sad. It’s really scraping the bottom of the cesspit.”

  Vilar shrugged again. He stared at the Saint-Jean station buildings in the distance and mused about all the people waiting for a train or for someone to arrive. That simple world of reunions and clear-cut destinations. Those quiet, joyful moments.

  “What does it matter what we think? Like you said, we’re just here to bail out the shit. So I try not to think about whether or not a case is sad. But you’re wrong, there’s no bottom to this cesspit. You can always dig deeper.”

  He gave Pradeau’s arm a friendly thump and forced himself to smile, then walked back to his car. He noticed that they were taking away the body, now hardly more than a shapeless mound in the regulation body bag, and he looked away, fumbling in his pockets for his keys.

  Before driving off, he sat for a moment, hands on the steering wheel amid the muffled clamour from outside. In the rear-view mirror he watched the procession of police officers and emergency vehicles moving off. Car doors slamming, men shaking hands or giving curt salutes. He had a metallic taste in his mouth – iron, maybe, or copper – and under his tongue he produced a little saliva which he swallowed with difficulty. Just as he pulled away the sun appeared above a rooftop, dazzling him, and he blindly groped for his sunglasses, then remembered he had left them back at the station with his cigarettes.

  He turned onto the cours de la Marne, his eyes smarting, squinting against the white light that flooded the city. He thought again about the boy, Victor, lying mute in that hospital ward, about the viscous silence that oozed from him, that invisible tar in which, in spite of his best efforts, he had become bogged down. And immediately an image of Pablo came to him and Vilar glanced in the rear-view mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of his son’s face. It was something he used to do, and he would feel stupidly happy seeing his son’s little face, grave or curious, intent on his Game Boy or staring at the passers-by and the scenery, and Vilar closed his eyes and felt a painful shudder around his heart because there was no-one in the mirror, nothing but the blinding rays of the sun on the stream of cars.

  “Pablo.” He spoke the name aloud as though it were a fact, or a report. Or some magical incantation. And though nothing appeared still he savoured the sound in his mouth like cool water, even if, as he drove on, it could do nothing to quench the acrid burning lump in his throat, the dull pain that crept into his jaw.

  When he climbed out of the car, his back and neck stiff, he could still feel the weight of his son on his back and he reached behind him to touch his neck, slippery with sweat, hoping to brush the boy’s fingers clinging there. In the lift he ran into one of the drug squad officers, Bachir, a tall thin guy with stooped shoulders, who leaned heavily against the side of the lift, rubbing his eyes with the back of a hand in the manner of a sleepy child. In a weary voice he asked how Vilar was, but he did not listen for the reply. Eyes half closed, dead on his feet, he was already standing in front of the doors, ready to step out as soon as the lift stopped.

  Vilar knew by the smell of perfume in his office that Capitaine Marianne Daras, his team leader, had been looking for him, leaving this faint scent in the air and, on his desk, a fluorescent green Post-it note on a blue file, asking him to call her. I got the autopsy report for you. Nothing new. You’ll see. We’ve got some information on the victim too that I think warrants further investigation. We need to focus on the neighbours.

  Vilar sat down heavily and opened the file, rummaged in the drawer for a pack of cigarettes, lit one, then stood up to open the window overlooking La Chartreuse cemetery. For a few moments he watched a dark-haired woman moving along the paths carrying a plant pot, saw her stop at a grave, her head bowed, her hair streaming in the breeze, then she stooped to clean the edge of the headstone and set the flowers down, watering them with a small bottle she took from her handbag.

  Vilar felt suddenly angry with himself for spying on this unknown woman. But he was a detective, it was a reflex. He often found himself watching people in the cemetery since the move to the new police station. Back in their old building, he had watched pigeons cooing on rooftops and the windowsills, leaving their droppings everywhere on the ancient, blackened stone.

  Some visitors to the cemetery walked purposefully, never hesitating over which way to go; others meandered, stopping at graves, peering at the inscriptions and then wandered off again, making several such stops before they reached their destination. Watching as they knelt or sat by the grave, ran a hand over the marble headstone, or stood for long minutes, Vilar could not help but wonder who they were visiting, whether they prayed or talked to the dead. And whether, as they left the cemetery, they promised, as he did himself, to come back soon to rest in peace forever.

  Pablo was not buried in a cemetery. There was nowhere he could go to talk to his son, to bring him flowers, to kneel and weep.

  Vilar went back to his
desk and opened the file. The dead woman was Nadia Fournier, born 4 August, 1972 in Gardanne in the Bouchesdu-Rhône. Her father was Michel Fournier, born 3 February, 1947, in Martigues, a professor of mathematics at the University of Aix-en-Provence. In an undated photograph possibly taken during a lecture, he was dark, lean and rather forbidding. He was about forty in the picture and seemed to be staring at someone or something, or perhaps he was lost in his thoughts. Vilar studied the photograph, trying to solve the riddle posed by this inscrutable face. He shrugged and turned the page.

  Nadia’s mother was Souad Kaci, born 15 November, 1951 in Oran, died 20 September, 1987 in Gardanne. Suicide, barbiturate overdose. She had been a teacher. There was nothing more about her. There was no photograph. Only a brief index card. She no longer existed. She was an abstraction. Like her daughter, she had died tragically young. And from the scant evidence available she had died alone. Though Vilar did not quite know why, he would have liked to see her face. To stare into her eyes, looking for a particular glint, a premonition? The reflection of some terrible sadness, some fatal shadow of doubt?

  Stapled to the next page was a photograph of Nadia, presumably taken from a photo album or a picture frame. Seeing it, Vilar shuddered: for a moment he could not tell which dead woman he was looking at. He thought back to the swollen face of a corpse he could scarcely bring himself to look at, a face that spoke only of death, a mask so grotesque that watching the funereal zip of the regulation body bag slide home had been a relief. But he felt, although he had never known her, as though he were looking at Souad, the teacher who committed suicide.

  Souad or Nadia? Her eyes spoke to him, spoke of terrible things barely relieved by a half-smile that seemed impatient or melancholy.