Talking to Ghosts (31 page)

“You said he had a bandage on his neck?”

“Yeah, a big thing like surgical collar. So who is he?”

“Someone we've been looking for. He's got a grudge against your sister, but we're protecting her. Did you call the local police? And what about the car, did you see what make it was?”

“No. I don't know anything about cars. It was an estate, really big, too … Pretty new, I guess, because it was gleaming. But no, I didn't call the police. In our family, we sort out our own problems, we don't get the police involved. When it comes to Sandra, I'm kind of used to situations like this.” She hesitated. “I'm all alone here with the kids. My husband's a truck driver, he's not here at the moment. Do you think we're in any danger from that guy?”

“No, I don't think you're in any danger. He's just trying to track down your sister, but we'll be waiting for him if he shows up. But give the local force a call, they'll keep an eye on things. Meanwhile, if you see him hanging around again, give me a call, maybe we can collar him.”

He heard the woman sigh, clearly relieved. She trotted out a few hollow platitudes about the world we live in, then asked if she could have another word with Sandra. Vilar handed the phone back and left the two sisters to say their goodbyes. Eventually Sandra rang off and set the mobile gently on the table in front of her, still open, as though her life depended on the next call, or the next, or the next.

“How did he know my sister's address? He didn't even know she existed!”

“You're sure you never mentioned her?”

“Of course I'm sure. I would never get her mixed up in my shit. She did more than enough for me when I was young, when I moved out of my parents” place and all she got for it was grief. And it's not like Éric could have looked her up on the internet, her last name is Ménenteau, not de Melo.'

Vilar looked at his watch. I was 8.50 p.m.

“He's coming here,” he said.

“Who?”

“What do you mean, who? Éric whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is. Who did you think I meant? We have to get out of here. Let's go up to your neighbour's place. You get the kid ready, and I'll get another officer to take you somewhere. We'll put you in a safe house.”

The neighbour, Madame Fadlaoui, opened as soon as they knocked,
looked at them wide-eyed and ushered them inside quickly, glancing anxiously along the walkway before she closed the door. She was a tall woman with a face like a knife, an aquiline nose. In the immaculately polished living room decorated with brass plates, intricate lamps, leather cushions and sofas, she invited them to sit down and offered them something to drink. In a corner of the room, a little girl was staring goggle-eyed at a flat-screen T.V. and jiggling the buttons on a games controller. Little characters were running and jumping and shooting at each other.

“You're the police officer, is that right?” Madame Fadlaoui said.

“My name is Sihem. And this is Amel.”

The little girl barely tore her eyes from the game to greet them with an extravagant flick of her eyelashes.

“What's going on?” Sihem Fadlaoui said.

“We need to leave,” Sandra said. “I'll explain everything later.”

The woman looked at Vilar questioningly. He turned away and keyed a number into his phone.

“Marianne? Something's come up … No, nothing, I don't have time to go into it right now. I need you to put out an alert for a man named Éric, surname unknown, released from prison in '93, probably from the Gironde area … No, that's all I've got. We're not talking some minor offence here, it had to be something major. Yeah, that kind of thing … Anyway, Sandra de Melo. I found her, she's here with me. We need to get her into a safe house, I'll sort that. O.K.? I'll call Laurent. I don't want news of this getting all around the station. This guy knows too much, he's got someone on the force feeding him information, I have confirmation of it … I'll tell you later, I've no time now. You have any idea where Laurent is at the moment? O.K., well that's not too far. He should get her quickly. I think our guy might come back. We need bodies here. I'll hang around to wait for reinforcements. Yeah, that's good.”

He hung up and keyed another number.

“Laurent?”

He gave a detailed account of the situation, told him that they had
identified the suspect, Éric, and had officers looking for him. Pradeau seemed overwhelmed by so much information, his uneasiness was palpable. Vilar felt as if he were dealing with a swimmer, overcome by exhaustion, plunging into the murmuring depths of the ocean. He told Pradeau to get a grip, said he needed him. Pradeau quickly composed himself and promised to get there within half an hour, and he kept his word.

By the time Pradeau rang the doorbell, José was half asleep, slumped against his mother, the clown in his arms. As a precaution, it was Vilar who opened the door. They said goodbye to Sihem Fadlaoui, thanked her for her help and warned her to lock the door and not to open it to anyone, and to call the police if she saw anything suspicious. The building would be under surveillance in case Éric came back. The woman turned the almost gentle steel of her grey face on the policemen and gave them a sceptical smile.

“My husband and my son will be home soon; that way I'll feel safer,” she said.

Sandra stepped out into the walkway behind Pradeau who was already on his way down the stairs, waving for the woman to follow him. Vilar brought up the rear. Little José was clinging to his mother's neck, his chin on her shoulder, staring behind her, looking up only when they passed a ceiling light. When Vilar appeared in his field of vision, the child raised his head, his mouth half open in surprise, then reverted to his previous position. Sandra de Melo was panting, José was a heavy child and she frequently had to hitch him up, having trouble finding a comfortable way to hold him.

It was now almost 11.00, nothing was stirring in the building. The buzz of television sets, the sound of muffled voices, music and laughter followed them to the ground floor, but they encountered no-one. Sandra and her son got into the back of Pradeau's car; he was to drive them to the police station until someone could find them a place for the night. As Vilar was heading back upstairs to hide out in Sandra's apartment, Pradeau insisted he take his weapon and pressed the pistol into his hands.

“You never know … this guy sounds like he's completely out of control.”

He did not give Vilar time to answer, quickly putting the car into gear and driving off. Vilar stared at the gun, watched the street light cast copper reflections on the steel, then he tucked it into his belt.

He was hardly back inside Sandra de Melo's apartment when his mobile rang.

“I see you're visiting that Portuguese slut … Did she give you a decent blow job? You do know that's her speciality?”

Vilar ran to the windows, cursing at the fact the shutters were closed. The guy was downstairs. How was it possible?

“How do you know that?”

“That she sucks cock? Guess! I've even got it on video. Just like I've got one of your son.”

Vilar almost ripped the handle off the door as he flung it open. He dashed along the walkway, took the stairs three at a time, slamming into the wall, because the mobile pressed to his ear threw him off balance.

“Doing a little jogging? You think you can catch me, dickhead? What, you think I'm going to be waiting outside the door? You dumb fucks didn't even set a trap – or ‘stake the place out', as you'd say. Jesus, even I feel embarrassed for you.”

Vilar arrived outside and looked around, started back towards his car, trying to catch his breath. He could hear the guy laughing on the other end of the line and he tried to think of something to say to needle him, to get to him somehow.

“She talk to you, did she?” the voice growled. “Tell you who I was? That little whore knows nothing. I suppose she told you my name's Éric? Well, good luck hunting. Makes no odds … I'm about to kill her anyway. I've got your mate's car about fifty metres ahead of me. Just wait till you see the expression on her face when I'm done. Maybe later I'll show you some more stuff about your son. Have to keep my priorities straight, can't do everything at once. You got to understand, I'm taking a risk here with a guy like you. Then again, I get off on it, so I can't really complain. O.K., shitface, see you round.”

Vilar ran the last few metres and jumped behind the wheel. He called Pradeau, but the call went straight to voicemail. He left a brief message, knowing it was pointless: hide, make a run for it, do whatever you have to because this psychopath is right behind you and more than capable of creating a bloodbath. Then he called the station to tell them an officer was in danger and to ask that patrol cars be despatched to secure the likely route. The duty officer promised to do the necessary. Pradeau had probably taken the most direct route to the police station. At this hour of the night, it should take him about fifteen minutes. Vilar floored the accelerator as hard as he dared, one hand pressing the mobile to his ear, trying again to get through to Pradeau, the other hand gripping the steering wheel. He negotiated every red light at speed and quickly found himself at the intersection of the boulevard Georges V and the rue de Pessac, where heavy traffic forced him to slow to a crawl. Cars honked their horns angrily at the way he was driving. All he needed now was for the local traffic police to arrest him or give chase, try to breathalyse him. He called the station again, narrowly missing a moped that shot out of a side street, and waited to hear if Pradeau had got back safely.

“He's not here,” the officer on the phone said. “He took the woman directly to a safe house.”

By now, Vilar could see the police station up ahead, rising up in the darkness, immense, white as an iceberg. He parked on the kerb, jerking the handbrake.

“What? What safe house?”

“Ah, that I don't know. No-one's told me.”

“Where the fuck is he? I called not five minutes ago to say there's an armed and very dangerous bastard on his tail, and what the fuck have you done about it? Would it really be so hard to get off your arse and do something to stop him being killed?”

The guy mumbled, called someone over. There seemed to be a commotion. As though an alarm had finally gone off, Vilar thought.

“Commandant Castel,” a voice said suddenly. “The officer has just been located. Place Jacques-Dormoy. We've got two units on their way
to the scene. Bystanders thought it was a fight between a couple of drunks and called the police.”

“What happened?”

“We don't know yet. We've paged Capitaine Daras.”

It took him less than ten minutes to get to the place Jacques-Dormoy, weaving through narrow, potholed streets lined with parked cars where he several times had to swerve to avoid hitting vehicles parked haphazardly on the pavement.

There were police everywhere. A dozen patrol cars. Every squad out tonight had clearly shown up the moment they heard that one of their own was in trouble. The metallic chatter of the radios mingled with that of the officers, while around the little square people peered out of their windows or gathered in groups along the pavements, waiting in this muted cacophony for some dramatic or tragic announcement. As he got out of his car, Vilar spotted a dog handler wearing blue fatigues getting his Alsatian to piss against a tree. Surveying the scene, illuminated by the convulsive blue flashes of the squad cars, Vilar felt his blood run cold because he knew all too well what was at the centre of this chaos of flickering lights: a place where nothing moved, where the noise and the voices suddenly fade, as though muffled by a wall of glass.

He flashed his warrant card to silence a driver yelling at him to move his vehicle. From behind, he immediately recognised Pradeau's car which had piled into a black Mercedes, hitting the driver's door and smashing the window. The doors on the other side were open onto the road and as he drew closer, he saw someone in a white coat leaning into the back seat and, just then, he heard the scream, a long wail broken by groans and splutters coming from inside the car. He walked more quickly, dodging between the cars, weaving between the officers standing talking, breaking though the semi-circle surrounding the screaming child and the five or six men working the scene. One of them, a lieutenant called Gallin working with Mégrier's team, a stocky blond man as short as he was fat, was just about to push Vilar aside when he recognised him.

“Where's Pradeau? Is he O.K.?”

“We don't know. There's only the kid. Your partner's not here.”

“What do you mean there's only the kid? Where did he go?”

“We have a witness who says he saw two men fighting and that they then got into the other guy's car.”

“They just got in? Pradeau wasn't injured? Where is he, this witness? And what about the woman?”

“She left with them. The witness didn't see much. He heard the car slam into the Mercedes, and he heard the screams, but when things got ugly he legged it.”

Vilar felt his mouth go dry.

“Are we looking for them?”

“No,” a voice behind him said. “Why on earth would we be doing that?”

It was Mégrier. He was snapping shut a mobile.

“I mean, obviously we just came out to get a bit of air, go for a spin. We'll give the kid a little injection so he keeps his trap shut and then we'll all go home to bed. I mean, you hardly expect us to disturb the whole town at this time of night, do you? We were just waiting for you to tell us what to do. We knew you'd be worried.”

The officers giggled silently at their commander's comeback.

“Do you take us for complete idiots or what? And where's the beautiful Marianne Daras? Doing the horizontal mambo? I'm sure she'll get here the moment she gets her knickers back on.”

Vilar could think of nothing to say; he shook his head. He walked around Mégrier and stepped closer to the Peugeot where José was still wailing. Officers were taking fingerprints and collecting evidence around the vehicle and inside the car itself. A S.A.M.U. paramedic kneeling on the back seat climbed out shaking his head, he sighed, ignoring Vilar's questioning look, then moved aside to let him pass. Now Vilar could see the boy, huddled on the back seat of the car, clinging to an unbuckled seatbelt that was bizarrely wound around him, thrashing about like a terrified animal whenever anyone tried to come near or speak to him. Vilar leaned one knee on the back seat, slowly
reached out his hand and called the boy by name. He looked around for Toto the clown, saw it on the passenger seat, picked it up and handed it to the little boy who hugged and kissed the doll, no longer wailing. Vilar watched as the boy looked up at him with big eyes, looked right through this stranger leaning over him, staring into the distance at some place no-one else could reach. He curled up again and began to howl sadly, banging the clown against his forehead. Vilar withdrew his hand and got out of the car. He was shivering, in spite of his sweatsoaked shirt, in the sweltering heat of the night.