Also by Bernard Minier

The Frozen Dead

A SONG FOR DROWNED SOULS

Bernard Minier

www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk

First published as Le Cercle in France in 2012 by XO Éditions

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Mulholland Books

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

1

Copyright © by XO Éditions 2012

Translation copyright © by Alison Anderson 2015

The right of Bernard Minier to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 73228 3

eBook ISBN 978 1 444 73230 6

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankments

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

The civilized people in the world, the ones who hide behind culture and art and politics … and even the law, they’re the ones to watch out for. They’ve got that perfect disguise goin’ for them, you know? But they’re the most vicious. They’re the most dangerous people on earth.

Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Under French law, when it is believed that a crime has been committed, an officer of the crime unit will inform the district public prosecutor, who in turn appoints an examining magistrate to the case.

Investigations are conducted under the supervision of these magistrates, who answer to the Ministry of Justice. Crimes may be investigated by police commissioners from the crime unit, along with commissioned offficers of the gendarmerie. The gendarmerie, technically, is a branch of the armed forces, but it is in charge of public safety, performing police duties among the civilian population, and thus is often called upon to collaborate with various police units.

Marsac is an imaginary town, but its institutions and inhabitants represent the academic crème de la crème, preparing students for the fiercely competitive entrance exams to the Grandes Écoles which, unlike regular universities in France, are selective and groom students to be the future leaders of the country.

Prologue

In the Tomb

In her mind there was a cry, nothing more.

A moan.

A cry of despair, screaming with rage, pain, loneliness. Everything that, for months on end, had deprived her of her humanity.

She was pleading, too.

Please, oh please, have mercy, please … let me out of here, I beg you.

In her mind, she was shouting and begging and weeping. But only in her mind: not a sound came from her throat. One fine day she awoke virtually mute. Mute … And she was someone who had always liked to talk. Words came so easily to her, words and laughter …

In the darkness, she shifted her position to ease the tension in her muscles. She was sitting on the dirt floor with her back against the stone wall. Sometimes she would stretch out. Or go over to the flea-ridden mattress in the corner. She spent most of her time sleeping, curled up in a foetal position. When she stood up, she stretched or walked as best she could – four strides this way, four strides back, no more: her cell measured six feet each way. It was pleasantly warm; she had known for a long time that there must be a boiler room on the other side of the door, not only because of the heat but also the sounds: humming, clicking, hissing. She had no clothes on. Naked as a newborn babe. For months, maybe years. She relieved herself in a bucket and had two meals a day, except when he went away: then she might go several days alone without eating or drinking, and hunger, thirst and the fear of death bore into her. There were two holes in the door: one at the very bottom, through which he passed her meals, and another in the middle, which was for watching her. Even when they were closed the holes let in two faint rays of light that pierced the obscurity of the cell. Her eyes had grown accustomed to this half darkness and she could make out details that no one else would have seen.

In the beginning she had explored her cage and listened out for the slightest sound. She had searched for a way to escape, a flaw in his system, the slightest little slackening on his part. Then she had stopped worrying about it. There was no flaw, no hope. She had lost track of how many weeks or months had gone by since her abduction. Since her life before. Roughly once a week, maybe more, maybe less, he ordered her to put her arm through the hole and he gave her an injection. It was painful, because he was clumsy and the liquid was thick. She lost consciousness almost at once and when she woke up she would find herself sitting in a dining room in a heavy high-backed armchair, her legs and torso bound to the chair. Washed, perfumed and dressed. Even her hair smelled good, of shampoo, and her breath, which must have been pestilential the rest of the time, smelled of toothpaste and peppermint. A fire burned brightly in the hearth, there were lit candles on the dark wooden table which shone like a lake and a delicious aroma rose from the plates. There was always classical music on the stereo. Like a conditioned animal, the moment she heard the music and saw the light from the flames and felt the clean clothes on her skin, her mouth began to water. Before he put her to sleep and removed her from her cell, he always made her go twenty-four hours without food.

From the pain, however, she could tell he had abused her while she slept. In the beginning the thought had filled her with horror and when she awoke back in the cellar she had thrown up her first real meal. Now it no longer affected her. Sometimes he didn’t say anything, sometimes he spoke incessantly, but she rarely listened to him: her brain was no longer used to following a conversation. The words music, symphony, orchestra constantly cropped up in his speech like a leitmotif, as did one name: Mahler.

How long had she been locked up? There was neither day nor night in her tomb. Because that was what it was: a tomb. Deep down, she knew she would never get out alive. Any hope had abandoned her long ago.

She remembered the simple, wonderful time when she was free. The last time she had laughed, had friends over, seen her parents; the smell of the barbecue in the summer, the evening light in the trees in the garden and her son’s eyes. Faces, laughter, games. She saw herself making love to one man in particular. She had thought it was just an ordinary life but in fact it was a miracle. Her regret that she had not appreciated it more fully grew greater by the day. She realised that even the moments of sorrow and pain had been nothing in comparison to the hell she was in now – this non-existence, buried in this non-place. Outside the world. She supposed that only a few feet of stone, cement and earth kept her from the real world, but at the same time, hundreds of doors, miles of corridors and fences could not have separated her further.

One day real life and the real world had been there, so close. For some unknown reason he had been obliged to move her in a hurry. He had dressed her hastily, bound her wrists behind her back and put a canvas bag over her head. Then he made her climb up some steps and she was in the open air. The open air … She had almost lost her senses with the shock of it.

When she felt the warm sun, and sensed the light through the bag, and breathed the damp smell of the earth and the fields, the perfume of the thickets in flower, and heard the chattering of birds, she had almost fainted. She had wept so profusely that the canvas bag was soaked.

Then he had made her lie down on a metal surface and through the canvas she inhaled exhaust and diesel oil. Even though she couldn’t have cried out, he had stuffed her mouth with cotton then covered it with surgical tape as a precaution. He had also bound her wrists and ankles together so that she couldn’t kick the side of the van. She felt the vibration of the engine and the van began to bounce over uneven ground before it reached the road. When he suddenly accelerated and she heard the rush of cars overtaking them, she realised they were on the motorway.

The worst of it had been the tollbooth. She could hear voices, music, the sound of engines all around her, so near … just there, on the other side of the metal. And dozens of human beings. Women, men, children, only a few inches away! She could hear them. She was overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. They were laughing, talking, coming and going, alive and free. They had no idea of her presence, her slow death, her life as a slave. She had shaken her head until she was banging it against the metal and her nose bled onto the grimy floor.

It was fine weather the day he moved her, she was almost certain that everything must be in bloom. Springtime. How many more seasons to come until he got tired of her, until she was defeated by madness, until he killed her? The sudden certainty came to her that her friends and family and the police had already given her up for dead: only one person on earth knew that she was still alive, and he was a demon, a snake, an incubus. She would never see the daylight again.

Friday

1

Dolls

And it was there, in the shady garden,

The killer’s shadow in cold ambush,

Shadow against shadow on the grass less green than

Red with evening’s blood.

In the trees, a nightingale

Was challenging Marsyras and Apollo.

Deeper down, an aviary of nests and

Mistletoe berries

In rustic setting …

Oliver Winshaw stopped writing. Blinked. At the edge of his vision something had attracted – or rather distracted – his attention. Beyond the window. A flash of light, outside. Like a camera flash.

The storm had broken over Marsac.

That night, as on every other night, he was sitting at his desk. He was writing a poem. His study was on the first floor of the house he had bought with his wife in the southwest of France thirty years earlier; a room with panelled oak walls, almost entirely covered with books. Primarily British and American poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Burns, Swinburne, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, e.e. cummings, Pound …

He knew he could never hold a candle to his personal idols, but he didn’t care.

He had never shown his poetry to anyone. He was approaching the winter of his life, even autumn was behind him now. Very soon he would build a big fire in the garden and into it he would throw 150 black notebooks. All in all, more than 20,000 poems. A poem a day for fifty-seven years. Probably the best kept secret of his life. Even his second wife had not been allowed to read them.

After all these years, he still wondered where he found his inspiration. When he looked back on his life, it was nothing but a long procession of days that always ended with a poem written in the evening in the peace of his study. He never went to bed until he had finished, sometimes at one or two o’clock in the morning, even back in the days when he had been working. He had never needed a great deal of sleep and his job was not physically demanding: English professor at the University of Marsac.

Oliver Winshaw was about to turn ninety.

He was a calm and elegant old man, known by all. When he settled in this picturesque little university town, he was immediately dubbed l’Anglais. This was before his compatriots had swooped down like a swarm of locusts onto everything in the region that possessed old stones to be restored, and the nickname became somewhat diluted. Now he was only one among hundreds of other Englishmen in the area. But with the economic crisis the English were heading for destinations that were more financially attractive, such as Croatia or Andalusia, and Oliver wondered whether he would live long enough to find himself once again the only Englishman in Marsac.

In the lily pond

The faceless shadow slides

Slender dreary profile

Like the knife’s keen sharpened edge.

He paused once again.

Music … He thought he could hear music above the regular patter of rain and the endless echoing of thunder across the sky. Obviously it couldn’t be Christine, she had been asleep for a long while. Yes, it was coming from outside: classical music.

Oliver grimaced in disapproval. They must have the volume on full blast for him to hear it in his study despite the storm and the closed window. He tried to concentrate on his poem, but there was nothing for it: bloody music!

Annoyed, he looked again at the window. A lightning glow came through the blinds, and he could see the rain streaming down. The storm seemed to be concentrating its fury on this small town, cutting it off from the rest of the world.

He pushed his chair back and stood up.

He went over to the window and cracked open the blinds. The central drain was spilling over onto the cobblestones. Above the rooftops, the night was streaked with thin bolts of lightning, as if inscribed with the trace of a luminescent seismograph.

In the house across the street all the lights were on. Perhaps they were having a party? The house in question, a townhouse with a garden to one side, was protected from the street and outside observers by a high wall. A single woman lived there; she was a professor at the lycée in Marsac, the most prestigious prep school in the region. A good-looking woman, with brown hair and an elegant figure, in the prime of her thirties. From time to time Oliver spied on her discreetly when she sunbathed in her deck chair, sheltered from all eyes – except his, because her garden was visible from his study window. There was something wrong. All the lights on every floor of the four-storey house were lit. And the front door was wide open, a little lantern clearly guiding the way to the threshold.

But he couldn’t see anyone in the windows.

At the side of the house, the French windows were wide open, banging in the wind, and the rain was driving at such an angle that it must be flooding the floor inside. Oliver could see it splashing on the tiles on the terrace and crushing the lawn.

That was probably where the music was coming from. He felt his pulse quicken. He looked slowly over towards the swimming pool.

Thirty feet by twenty. Sand-coloured tiles all around. A diving board.

He felt a sort of dark excitement, the kind that grabs you when something unusual has just interrupted your daily routine. And at his age, routine made up his entire life. His gaze travelled all around the swimming pool. At the end of the garden the forest of Marsac began, 2,700 hectares of woods and paths. There was no barrier on that side, not even a chain-link fence, just a compact wall of vegetation.

Oliver focused his attention on the pool. The surface seemed to be dancing slightly. He narrowed his gaze. First of all, he wondered what he was seeing. Then he realised that several dolls were bobbing on the water. Yes, that’s what it was … Even though he knew it was only dolls, he felt an inexplicable shiver go through him. They were floating next to each other, their pale dresses rippling on the rain-battered surface. Oliver and his wife had been invited for coffee once by their neighbour from across the street. His wife had been a psychologist before she retired, and she had a theory about the profusion of dolls in the home of a single woman in her thirties. When they got home she explained to her husband that their neighbour was probably a ‘woman-child’, and Oliver had asked her what she meant. She had gone on to use expressions such as ‘immature’, ‘evading responsibility’, ‘thinking only of her own pleasure’, ‘undergone an emotional trauma’, and Oliver had beaten a hasty retreat from the conversation: he had always preferred poets to psychologists. But he was damned if he could fathom why there were dolls in the swimming pool.

I ought to ring the gendarmes, he thought. And tell them what? That there are dolls floating in a swimming pool? But it wasn’t normal. The house all lit up, no one in sight, and those dolls – where was the owner?

He opened the window. A wave of humidity came into the room. The rain beat against his face, he blinked at the strange gathering of plastic faces, with their staring eyes.

He could hear the music perfectly now. It was familiar, although it wasn’t Mozart, his favourite composer.

Dammit, what the hell was going on!

A bolt of lightning severed the darkness, immediately followed by a deafening clap of thunder. The noise made the windowpanes vibrate. Like a blinding light from a projector, the lightning showed that someone was there. Someone sitting at the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the water, and Oliver hadn’t noticed him because he was swallowed by the shadow of the tall tree in the middle of the garden. A young man … Bent over the floating tide of dolls, gazing at them. Although he was nearly fifty feet away, Oliver could make out the lost, frantic expression in the young man’s eyes, and his gaping mouth.

Oliver Winshaw’s chest was an echo chamber, his heart pounding like a demonic percussionist. What was going on here? He rushed over to the telephone and took the receiver from its cradle.

2

World Cup

‘Anelka is a loser,’ said Pujol.

Vincent Espérandieu looked at his colleague and wondered whether his opinion was based on the striker’s poor performance, or on his origins and the fact he came from a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. Pujol had no fondness for council estates, and even less for their inhabitants.

For once, however, Espérandieu had to admit that Pujol was right: Anelka was useless. Worthless. Hopeless. Like the rest of the team, as it happened. This first match was a heartbreaker. Only Martin seemed not to care. Espérandieu looked over at him and smiled: he was sure his boss didn’t even know the name of the manager whom all of France despised and who had been called every name in the book.

‘Domenech is one fucking coward,’ said Pujol, as if he had been reading Vincent’s thoughts. ‘If we made it into the final in 2006, it’s because Zidane and the rest of the team took over.’

No one disputed the fact, and Pujol wove his way through the crowd to fetch another beer. The bar was packed. 11 June 2010: the opening day and first matches of the World Cup in South Africa, including the match that was on the screen at that very moment, Uruguay-France, 0-0 at half time. Vincent looked again at his boss. He had his eyes glued to the screen, but his gaze was empty. Commandant Martin Servaz was just pretending to watch the match, and his assistant knew it.

Not only was Servaz not watching the match, but he wondered what on earth he was doing there.

He’d wanted to please his team by going along with them. For weeks now there’d been talk of little else but the World Cup at the regional crime squad. What sort of condition the players were in, the catastrophic friendlies they’d played, including a humiliating defeat against China, the selector’s choices, the hotel that was expensive beyond belief: Servaz was beginning to wonder if a third world war would have aroused this much attention. Probably not. He hoped that criminals were similarly engrossed and that the crime statistics would go down all on their own without anyone having to lift a finger.

He reached for the cold beer that Pujol had just placed in front of him and raised it to his lips. On the screen, the match had started again. The little men in blue were running around with the same useless energy as before; they hurried from one end of the pitch to the other and Servaz could see absolutely no logic behind their moves. As for the strikers, he was no expert, but they seemed particularly clumsy. He had read somewhere that travel and accommodation for the team would cost the French Football Federation over one million euros, and he would have loved to know where they got their money from, and whether he himself would have to dig into his pocket. But although ordinarily his neighbours in the bar, as taxpayers, were easily riled, this question did not seem to trouble them as much as the ongoing absence of goals. Servaz tried all the same to get interested in what was happening, but there was a constant unpleasant buzzing from the television, as if it were a giant beehive. Someone had explained to him that it was the sound made by the thousands of trumpets the South African spectators had brought to the stadium. He wondered how they could produce and above all how they could stand such a racket: even at this distance, attenuated by microphones and technological filters, the sound was particularly enervating.

Suddenly the lights in the bar flickered and exclamations could be heard all around: the image on the screen shrank and disappeared then suddenly flashed back on. The storm was hovering over Toulouse like a flock of crows. Servaz gave a faint smile at the thought of everyone sitting in the dark, deprived of their football match.

His distracted thoughts veered into a familiar but dangerous zone. Eighteen months gone by and still no sign of life from Julian Hirtmann. Eighteen months, but not a day went by that Servaz didn’t think about him. The Swiss convict had escaped from the Wargnier Institute during the winter of 2008, only a few days after Servaz had visited him in his cell. At their meeting, he had discovered to his amazement that he and the former prosecutor from Geneva shared the same passion: the music of Gustav Mahler. And then there had been escape for Hirtmann, and for Servaz – the avalanche.

Eighteen months, he thought. Five hundred and forty days, which meant just as many nights having the same nightmare over and over. The avalanche … He was buried in a coffin of snow and ice, and he was beginning to run out of air, while the cold numbed his limbs … Then finally the drill making its way through, and someone furiously clearing the snow above him. A blinding light on his face, gulping fresh air by the lungful, his mouth gaping, until a face filled the open space. Hirtmann’s face. He burst out laughing, and said, ‘Bye, Martin,’ then filled up the hole again …

Give or take a few variations, the dream always ended the same way.

He had survived the avalanche. But in his nightmares, he died. And in a way, part of him had died up there that night.

What was Hirtmann doing at that very moment? Where was he? With a shiver Servaz pictured the snowy landscape, its incredible majesty … the dizzying summits protecting the lost valley … the building with its thick walls … locks clanging at the end of a deserted corridor … And then that door with the familiar music.

‘About time,’ said Pujol next to him.

Servaz glanced distractedly at the screen. One player was leaving the pitch, another was replacing him. He gathered it was Anelka again. He looked at the upper left-hand corner of the screen: the seventy-first minute, and the score was still 0-0. Hence the tension that reigned in the bar. Next to him, a big man who must have weighed twenty stone and was sweating abundantly beneath his red beard, tapped him on the shoulder as if they were friends and blew in his face with his booze-heavy breath: ‘If I was the coach, I’d give ’em a good kick up the arse to get ’em moving, the wankers. What the fuck, they won’t even budge for the World Cup.’

Servaz wondered if his neighbour was much in the habit of moving – apart from when he had to drag himself down here or go and fetch his six-packs at the corner shop.

He wondered why he didn’t like watching sports on television. Was it because his ex-wife, Alexandra, unlike him, had never missed a match with her favourite team? They had been the kind of couple who, Servaz had suspected from day one, would not last long. In spite of that, they got married and stuck it out for seven years. He still didn’t know how they could have taken so long to realise what was so obvious: they were as mismatched as a member of the Taliban and a supermodel. What did they have left today, other than their eighteen-year-old daughter? But he was proud of his daughter. Oh yes, he was proud. Even if he still hadn’t got used to her look, her body piercings and her hairstyle, it was in his footsteps Margot was following, not her mother’s. Like him, she liked to read and like him, she had qualified for the most prestigious literary prep school in the region. Marsac. The best students went there from miles around, some from as far away as Montpellier or Bordeaux.

If he thought about it, he had to admit that at the age of forty-one he had only two focuses of interest in his life: his job and his daughter. And books … but books were something else, they were not merely a focus, they were his entire life.

Was it enough? What were the lives of others made up of? He looked at the bottom of his glass, where there was nothing left but a few specks of foam, and he decided he’d had enough to drink for one evening. He felt a sudden urgent desire to pee and he wove his way to the door to the toilets. They were disgusting. A bald man had his back to him, and Servaz could hear his stream striking the urinal.

‘That team is nothing but a bunch of no-hopers,’ said the man. ‘They’re a disgrace to watch.’

He went back out without bothering to wash his hands. Servaz soaped and rinsed his own for a long time, dried them, and as he went back out he drew his right hand into his sleeve before taking hold of the door handle.

A quick glance at the screen told him nothing had changed in his absence, even though the match was drawing to a close. The audience was a simmering volcano of frustration. Servaz figured that if things continued like this, there would be riots. He went back to his spot.

His neighbours were shouting, things like, ‘Go on!’ ‘Pass the ball, fuck, pass it!’ ‘On the right, on the riiight!’ which meant that at least something was happening, finally, when he felt a familiar vibration in his pocket. He reached into his trousers and took out his phone. Not a smartphone, but a good old Nokia. The mobile had already transferred the call to his voicemail, and the text read ‘888’.

Servaz dialled the number to access the message.

And froze.

The voice on the line … It took him half a second to recognise it. Half a second of eternity. Time-space contracting, as if the twenty years separating him from the last time he had heard it could be erased in two heartbeats. Even after all this time, he felt something tunnelling deep into his belly.

It was as if the room were beginning to spin. The cries, the shouts of encouragement, the buzzing of the vuvuzelas all receded, lost in a mist. The present contracted, became tiny. The voice was saying, ‘Martin? It’s me, Marianne. Call me, please. It’s very important. I beg you, call me back as soon as you get this message.’

A voice from the past – but also a voice in which he could hear fear.

Samira Cheung tossed the leather jacket onto the bed and looked at the fat man who was leaning against the pillows, smoking.

‘You’ve got to go. I have to go to work.’

The man sitting in her bed was at least thirty years older than she was, had an unmistakeable potbelly and white hair on his chest, but Samira didn’t care. He was a good lay, and that, in her opinion, was all that mattered. She herself was no beauty queen. Ever since the lycée she had known that most men found her ugly – or rather that they thought her face was ugly and her body was singularly attractive. Given the strange ambivalence she aroused in them, the scales tipped sometimes one way, sometimes the other. Samira Cheung made up for it by sleeping with as many men as she could; she had known for a long time that the most handsome were not necessarily the best lovers, and she was looking for men who were good in bed, not Prince Charming.

The big bed creaked as her round-bellied lover lifted his legs out from under the sheets and leaned over to retrieve his neatly folded clothes. Samira pulled on a pair of knickers and a T-shirt then disappeared through the trap door in the floor.

‘Booze or coffee?’ she shouted from below.

She made her way through the little red kitchen that was so narrow it looked like a ship’s galley, and switched on the capsule coffee maker. With the exception of the bare bulb over her head, the big house was plunged into darkness. And for a reason: Samira had bought the ruin twenty kilometres from Toulouse the year before. She was gradually restoring it, choosing her occasional lovers from various trades – electricians, plumbers, masons, painters, roofers – and for the time being she lived in only one-fifth of the inhabitable space. The rooms on the ground floor were completely empty of furniture, draped in plastic tarpaulins, the walls covered with scaffolding, pots of dripping paint and tools, as was half of the first floor, and she had made the attic into a bedroom for the time being.

The man went heavily down the ladder. She handed him a steaming espresso and took a bite from an apple that had already been started and was going brown on the countertop. Then she vanished into the bathroom. Five minutes later she went into the ‘dressing room’. All her clothes were hanging temporarily from long metal rods encased in thin plastic covers, while her underwear and T-shirts were stored in small dressers with plastic drawers, and dozens of pairs of boots stood in a row against the wall.

She pulled on a pair of jeans with holes in, flat-heeled ankle boots, a clean T-shirt and a leather belt with studs. Then the holster for her service weapon. And a military parka for the rain.

‘You still here?’ she said, re-entering the kitchen.

The fat fifty-year-old wiped the jam from his lips. He pulled her closer and kissed her. She submitted for a moment, then pulled away.

‘When are you going to fix my shower?’

‘Not this weekend. My wife is coming back from her sister’s place.’

‘Find a day. This week.’

‘My schedule is full,’ he protested.

‘No plumbing, no fucking.’

The man frowned.

‘Maybe Wednesday afternoon. I’ll have to see.’

‘The keys will be in the usual place.’

She was going to say something else when a mixture of electric-guitar riffs and horror-film screams could be heard somewhere. The first bars of a song by Agoraphobic Nosebleed, an American grindcore group. By the time she found her mobile, the screaming had stopped. She looked at the number on the screen: Vincent. The phone vibrated. A text message:

Call me back.

Which she did at once.

‘What’s up?’

‘Where are you?’ he asked without answering.

‘I’m at home, I was about to leave. I’m on duty tonight.’

On a night like this, every man in the squad who had managed to call in sick had done so.

‘What about you, you’re not watching the match?’ she asked.

‘We’ve had a call.’

An emergency. Probably the deputy on call at the public prosecutor’s office. Hard luck for any football fans. At the law courts, as well, the televisions must be overheating. She’d even had trouble finding a lover for the evening: it was obvious that football was winning over fucking that night.

‘Did the prosecutor’s office call?’ she asked. ‘What’s going on?’

‘No, it wasn’t the prosecutor’s office.’

‘It wasn’t?’

She could hear unusual tension in Espérandieu’s voice.

‘I’ll explain. No point going to the crime division. Take your car and get over here. Have you got something to write with?’

Paying no attention to her guest, who stood next to her growing impatient, Samira opened a kitchen drawer and took out a pen and a Post-it.

‘Hang on … okay, right.’

‘I’ll give you the address, meet us there.’

‘Go ahead.’

She raised an eyebrow as she wrote it down, even though he couldn’t see her.

‘Marsac? That’s way out in the country. Who called you, Vincent?’

‘I’ll explain. We’re already on our way. Meet us there as soon as you can.’

‘Us? Who’s us?’

‘Martin and me.’

‘Fine. I’ll come as quick as I can.’

She hung up. Something was wrong.

3

Marsac

The rain hammered relentlessly on the roof of the car. It danced in the headlights, flooded the windscreen and the road, banished animals to their burrows and isolated the rare passing vehicles from one another. It had come from the west, like an army invading new territory. This was no simple downpour; it was a deluge. From time to time, flashes of lightning scored the sky but the rest of the time they could see nothing beyond the headlights. It was as if a cataclysm had drowned all inhabited land and they were making their way along the bottom of the ocean.

Servaz peered out at the road. The pulsing of the windscreen wipers echoed that of his heart, which was contracting and dilating far too quickly. They had left the motorway a while ago and were driving now through hills plunged in rural darkness. Vincent had slipped a CD by Queens of the Stone Age into the player and for once Martin had not objected.

He was far too absorbed by his own thoughts.

For a split second Espérandieu took his eyes from the road. He saw the glow from the headlights and the to and fro of the wipers reflected in his boss’s black pupils. Servaz was staring at the tarmac the way he had been staring at the television screen not long before: without seeing it. His deputy thought of the telephone call again. From the moment he’d got it, Martin had been transformed. Vincent gathered that something had happened in Marsac, and that the person at the other end of the line was an old friend. Servaz wouldn’t say anything more. He had told Pujol to stay and watch the match and asked Espérandieu to go with him.

The rain eased up a bit just as the Renault headed into the tunnel of plane trees that marked the entrance to the town, and they wound their way through the little streets in the centre, jiggling along the cobblestones.

‘To the left,’ said Servaz when they reached a square with a church.

Espérandieu could not help but notice the number of pubs, cafés and restaurants. Marsac was a university town. 18,503 inhabitants. And almost as many students. Faculties of letters, science, law, economy, and management, and the renowned prep school. Newspapers, always eager for a pithy epithet, had dubbed it ‘the Cambridge of the Southwest’. From a strictly police point of view, the influx of so many students meant recurring problems with drink and drug driving, dealing, and damage caused during student protests. But there was nothing that fell within the remit of the crime squad.

‘It looks as if the power is out.’

The streets were engulfed in darkness. They could just make out moving flickers of light behind the windows: torches. The storm, thought Vincent.

‘Go around the square and take the second street on the right.’

They drove around the little circular piazza and left by a narrow cobblestone street that wound its way up past tall facades. Through the downpour, twenty metres further along, they could make out the swirl of revolving lights. The gendarmerie. Someone had called them.

‘What’s going on here?’ said Espérandieu. ‘Did you know that the gendarmerie was in on this?’

They pulled over behind a Renault Trafic and a Citroën C4, both of which were painted in the colours of the gendarmerie. Since his boss didn’t answer, Vincent turned and looked at him. Martin looked more tense than usual. He gave his assistant a puzzled, reticent look and climbed out of the car.

In less than five seconds Servaz’s hair and shirt were drenched. Several members of the gendarmerie were stoically sheltering beneath waterproof windbreakers. One came over to them and Servaz pulled out his warrant card. The gendarme raised his eyebrows to convey his astonishment that the crime squad was on the scene before the prosecutor had even referred the case to them.

‘Who’s in charge?’ asked Servaz.

‘Captain Bécker.’

‘Is he inside?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know whether—’

Servaz walked past the gendarme without waiting to hear the rest.

‘Martin!’

He turned his head to the left. A Peugeot 307 had pulled in a bit further down the narrow street. There was someone standing on the driver’s side, behind the open door, someone he had thought he would never see again.

The streaming rain, the dazzling, spinning lights from the vehicles, the faces beneath the windbreakers, everything was a blur. But he would still have recognised her among thousands. She was wearing a raincoat, the collar turned up. It really was her. She was standing straight with her hand on the door, her chin up, the way he remembered. Her face was ravaged by fear and sorrow, but she had not abandoned her pride.

That was what he had loved, back then, that pride. Until it became a wall between them.

‘Hello, Marianne,’ he said.

She hurried over to him. A moment later she was embracing him. He felt a sort of seismic shock go through him, along with the sobs that were shaking her. He put his arms around her, without holding her tighter. A gesture that spoke more of protocol than intimacy. How many years had it been? Nineteen? Twenty? She had cast him out of her life, had gone off with someone else, and found a way to leave him with the blame. He had loved her, yes. Perhaps more than any other woman before or since. But it had all happened in another century, so long ago …

She took a step back and looked at him, and her long hair, now drenched, caressed his cheek as she did so. Once again he felt a slight tremor go through him, magnitude 4 on the Servaz scale. Her eyes, so close, like two green and shining pools. He read a multitude of contradictory emotions in them, including pain, sorrow, doubt and fear. But also gratitude and hope. A tiny, timid hope. That she placed in him. He looked elsewhere to calm the pounding of his heart. Nineteen years and she had hardly changed at all, beyond the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and her mouth.

He brought to mind her words on the telephone: ‘Something terrible has happened.’ At the time, he thought she was talking about herself, something she had done, until he realised it was about her son: ‘Hugo … he found a woman in her house, dead. Everything makes him look guilty, Martin … They’ll say he did it …’ As she spoke her voice was so broken by sobs, her throat so tight, that he hadn’t understood half of what she was saying.

‘What happened?’

‘He just called me. He was drugged … He woke up in this woman’s house and she was … dead …’

It was absurd, what she was telling him, it made no sense. He wondered if she had been drinking, or had taken something.

‘Marianne, I don’t understand. What are you talking about? Who is this woman?’

‘A teacher. In Marsac. One of his teachers.’

Marsac … That’s where Margot was studying. Even on the telephone he had found it difficult to hide his distress. Then he said to himself that between the university, the lycée and the secondary school, there must be at least a hundred teachers in Marsac. What were the odds that Margot had been one of her students?

‘They’re going to accuse him, Martin … He’s innocent. Hugo could never do such a thing. I beg you, you have to help us …’

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said now. ‘I—’

‘Not now … go on home. I’ll be in touch.’

She gave him a desperate look. Without waiting for her answer, he turned on his heels and headed towards the house.

‘Captain Bécker?’

‘Yes.’

He flashed his card for the second time, even though it was difficult to see anything inside the house.

‘Commandant Servaz, Toulouse crime squad. This is Lieutenant Espérandieu.’

‘Who called you?’ asked Bécker right away.

A stocky man in his early fifties, he looked like the sort who slept badly, judging from the bags under his eyes. He also looked as if he had been very shaken up by what he had seen. And he was in a foul temper. Yet another man who’d been dragged away from his football.

‘A witness,’ said Servaz evasively. ‘Who called you?’

Bécker sniffed, reluctant to share his information with strangers.

‘A neighbour. Oliver Winshaw. An Englishman who lives there, across the street.’

He pointed over the wall.

‘What did he see?’

‘The window of his study overlooks the garden. He saw a young man sitting beside the pool and a load of dolls floating in the water. He thought it was peculiar, so he called us.’

‘Dolls?’

‘Yes. You can see for yourself.’

They were standing in the living room: the house was in complete darkness, like all the houses in Marsac. The door to the street was open and the only light in the room came from the headlights of the vehicles parked outside, stretching the men’s shadows across the walls. In the obscurity Servaz could make out an open-plan kitchen, a round glass table sparkling with reflected light, four wrought-iron chairs, a dresser and, behind a column, a stairway leading to the floor above. The humid air wafted in through the French windows, and Servaz noted that someone had blocked them so they wouldn’t bang.

A gendarme walked past them; the beam from his torch lit up their silhouettes for a moment.

‘We’re in the process of setting up a generator,’ said Bécker.

‘Where’s the kid?’ asked Servaz.

‘In the van. In safe custody. We’re going to take him back to the gendarmerie.’

‘And the victim?’

The gendarme pointed to the ceiling.

‘Up there. In the attic. In the bathroom.’

From his voice, Servaz could tell he was still in shock.

‘Did she live alone?’

‘Yes.’

Judging from what he had seen from the street, it was a big house: four floors, if you included the attic and the ground floor – even though each level was no more than fifty square metres.

‘She was a teacher, right?’

‘Claire Diemar. Thirty-two years old. She taught I don’t know what in Marsac.’

Servaz’s gaze met the captain’s in the darkness.

‘The kid was one of her students,’ said Bécker.

‘What?’

The thunder had drowned out the gendarme’s words.

‘I said, the kid was in one of her classes.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Servaz stared at Bécker in the dark, both of them lost in thought.

‘I suppose you’re more used to this sort of thing than I am,’ said the gendarme at last. ‘But let me warn you: it is not a pretty sight. I’ve never seen anything so … revolting.’

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. They turned towards it. ‘May I know who you are?’

Someone was coming down the stairs.

‘Commandant Servaz, Toulouse crime squad.’

The man held out a leather-gloved hand. He must have been almost seven feet tall. At the top of his body Servaz could just make out a long neck, a strange square head with protruding ears and hair cut very short. The giant crushed his still-damp hand in the soft leather.

‘Roland Castaing, public prosecutor for Auch. I’ve just had Catherine on the telephone. She told me you were on your way. May I ask who filled you in?’

He was referring to Cathy d’Humières, chief prosecutor for the Toulouse region, whom Servaz had worked with several times before, in particular on the case that had taken him to the Wargnier Institute a year and a half earlier. Now Servaz hesitated.

‘Marianne Bokhanowsky, the young man’s mother,’ he replied.

A silence fell.

‘Do you know her?’

The prosecutor’s tone was slightly astonished and suspicious. He had a deep, solemn voice that rolled over his consonants like the wheels of a cart over pebbles.

‘Yes. A bit. But I hadn’t seen her for years.’

‘So why, in that case, did she call you?’ asked Castaing.

Once again Servaz hesitated.

‘Undoubtedly because my name has been in the news.’

For a moment the man remained silent. Servaz could tell that he was examining him, looking down on him from his great height. Even in the dark he could tell the prosecutor’s gaze was on him, and he shivered: the newcomer made him think of a statue from Easter Island.

‘Ah yes, of course … The killings at Saint-Martin-de-Comminges. Of course, that was you … an incredible business. I imagine it must leave a mark, a case like that, Commandant?’

There was something about the magistrate’s tone that Servaz found extremely unpleasant.

‘That still doesn’t explain what you are doing here.’

‘I told you: Hugo’s mother asked me to come and take a look.’

‘The case has not yet been assigned to you,’ said the magistrate sharply.

‘No, it hasn’t.’

‘It falls within the jurisdiction of the public prosecutor’s office at Auch. Not Toulouse.’

Servaz almost replied that the office in Auch had only a very small investigation squad, and that not a single major criminal investigation had been assigned to it in recent years, but he refrained.

‘You’ve come a long way to get here, Commandant,’ said Castaing. ‘And I suppose, like all of us, you had to sacrifice the evening’s television. So go on up and have a look, but I warn you: it’s not a pretty sight. Although it’s true that, unlike most of us, you’ve seen worse.’

Servaz merely nodded. Suddenly he knew that he had to be on this case, no matter what.

The dolls were looking at the night sky. Servaz thought to himself that a corpse floating in the swimming pool would have more or less the same expression. They were rocking, their pale dresses undulating to the same rhythm, and sometimes they bumped together lightly. He was standing at the edge of the pool with Espérandieu. His assistant had opened an umbrella the size of a parasol over their heads. The rain was ricocheting off it, and off the flagstones and the toes of their shoes.

‘Fuck,’ said Espérandieu, simply.

This was his favourite way of summing up a situation that, in his opinion, was incomprehensible.

‘She collected them,’ he said. ‘I don’t think whoever killed her brought them with him. He must have found them in the house.’

Servaz nodded. He counted. Nineteen … Another flash of lightning lit up their streaming faces. The most striking thing was all those staring expressions. He knew that a similar expression would be waiting for them upstairs, and he prepared himself mentally.

‘Let’s go.’

Once they were indoors, they put on gloves, caps over their hair, and nylon overshoes. Darkness enveloped them; the generator wasn’t working yet, apparently there was a technical problem. They prepared themselves in silence; neither Vincent nor Servaz felt like talking. Servaz took out his torch and switched it on. Espérandieu did the same. They began to climb the stairs.