Talking to Ghosts (33 page)

If Sandra de Melo was not dead, it was only because an old woman out walking her dog at about 1.00 a.m. had started screaming when she saw the guy kicking and punching something she dimly recognised as a human being, Only as she drew closer did she realise it was a woman. The yapping dog had dragged its arthritic mistress towards the hulking figure who was raining blows on the broken body that jerked and twitched but made no sound. The man had made his escape in a large estate car of unknown make, possibly grey – the old lady had very bad eyesight, and had been unable to make out anything at all of the number plate.

When the ambulance arrived, Sandra was lying curled up in a gutter, her head in a pool of blood. The paramedics quickly noticed a deep wound to the occipital bone and several fractures to the face – the nose, the jaw, the supraorbital arch – and diagnosed an intracranial haemorrhage. Her heart stopped beating but was restarted with a defibrillator. Vilar, who arrived just as she was being lifted into the ambulance, did not recognise the misshapen face with the bruised and swollen eyes, the split lip. He felt as though he were seeing Nadia as she had been on the day her body was found. Once more, the two women seemed determined to merge into one, but when he commented about this to Daras she shrugged and turned angrily away.

“I don't give a damn about your disturbing insights, Pierre. I want this bastard stopped right now, do you understand? He kills, he murders victims, he kidnaps one of ours, shit, this guy didn't get to be who
he is in the space of a month. He has form, he's got a record and I'm guessing not just for assault. Jesus Christ, I want a name at the very least, and before tomorrow night.”

She was trembling. For all the horrendous crime scenes the two of them had witnessed together, Vilar had never seen her so distraught. Without waiting for a response, she walked over to where Mégrier and his men were cordoning off the area and, since there was a whole team working the scene, Vilar decided to go home.

He had driven, oblivious to the chaotic tangle of cars around him, with the sensation of slowly emerging from the weight of this muggy night, as though stepping through a curtain of cobwebs which were impossible to brush away, that dusty glue that sticks to the hair, clings to the eyelids, the filthy hands, the futile gestures. He had slept for two or three hours with no dreams, no nightmares: perhaps, realising that he was exhausted, his little ghost had decided to leave him in peace for once. He had taken a barely lukewarm shower, drunk half a cafetière of coffee and polished off a packet of sponge fingers and felt almost fine by the time he went down to the garage to find himself in his car, out on the street, back in this city where he could no longer bring himself to look at anything. He needed a cigarette, and indeed would have liked another coffee and something to eat to go with it, he desperately wished he were anywhere but here, behind this steering wheel, and he tried not to think about the place he would like to be, because it was too far away and there was no way back.

He called the hospital. Sandra was still in a coma. The charge nurse in the intensive care unit, who spoke in a gentle, slightly weary voice, told him not to give up hope, that sometimes they saw catastrophic situations improve in a matter of hours. For the moment, the patient was stable. It was a promising sign that her condition had not deteriorated. They would have to wait. When she did not say anything else, Vilar suggested a time frame, though he knew it was pointless.

“Forty-eight hours?”

“Yes, that's about right. Let's say forty-eight hours. Well, if you'll excuse me, someone's calling on the other line.”

She had already hung up by the time he could say thank you. From what little he could guess of the extent of Sandra's injuries, Vilar started weighing up her chances of surviving, and the long-term consequences if she did manage to pull through. He set the mobile down on the passenger seat and weaved between a parked bus and a truck that sat on the edge of a vast building site that had transformed this part of the ring road into a disaster area. He turned onto the cours de Médoc, slowing to a crawl in the early rush hour traffic. He called the station and discovered that Pradeau was still missing. They were moving heaven and earth to find him. “But given what he did to the girl, who knows what that fucker has done to Laurent. Everyone's really worried,” Ledru said, a young lieutenant whom Vilar liked – somewhat nervous, but always reliable. “Otherwise, there are three of us combing through prison records for a con named Éric released between '92 and '94.”

“And?”

“So far, we've got seventy-six. We're cross-referencing against the crimes they were banged up for.”

Vilar got him to promise he would call the minute they found something.

“Daras was looking for you five minutes ago,” Ledru said.

“I'm on the cours Balguerie. I'll be there as soon as I can be. Tell her. She'll know what I mean.”

The studio flat Nadia had used could not have been more than twenty square metres. Vilar sat in a corner watching the forensics team from
l'Identité judiciaire
taking prints and bagging evidence. At present, all he could hear was their surprise at the lack of any useable prints.

“Someone's scrubbed this place spotless,” Lopez said after about five minutes, holding up a fingerprint brush. “We'll see what we can get, but it doesn't look promising. It's like being in a sterile laboratory.”

The interviews with the neighbours had produced nothing: no-one had seen or heard anything. No particular comings and goings. The studio was on the first floor, making it easy to enter or leave without anyone else noticing. The police had found two champagne bottles in the fridge, a few snacks in the cupboards, two glass champagne flutes
and some plastic tumblers and plates. In the bathroom, there were some clean towels. A tube of toothpaste but no toothbrush, some cotton buds and a dried-out bar of soap.

Vilar tried to get in touch with the owner of the building, and only reached his secretary. She tried to contact her boss on his mobile, Vilar could hear her talking on the other line, but could not understand what she was saying, perhaps because she had put her hand over the receiver or stood up to use her mobile. When she came back on the line, she told him that he could dial the number she was about to give him and Monsieur Vacher would answer straight away. Vilar rang off without saying goodbye and dialled the number.

He could hear machinery, men's voices, banging, a plank falling, an engine starting up. A voice yelled down the line asking who was calling. When Vilar introduced himself, the man told him he was looking for a quieter place to talk because just now he was on a building site. And suddenly the racket faded and he stopped shouting.

Vilar explained to him that a studio flat in his building on the cours Balguerie had been rented by a woman engaged in prostitution, and that he needed more information because there was no record among Nadia Fournier's papers of any rent having been paid.

“That's probably because I never received any rent for that studio, monsieur.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because it hasn't been rented for the past seven or eight months. I've been planning to do some work on it – the place is old-fashioned and doesn't meet the typical standard of luxury in the area. So, to be honest, I'm wondering what you're talking about.”

There was no trace of irritation in Monsieur Vacher's tone. He sounded polite and surprised, and Vilar decided to be tactful because he sensed something was about to open up beneath his feet. Perhaps, as he expected, some kind of pit with an unpalatable truth at the bottom.

“I am in your studio right now, Monsieur Vacher, with two forensics officers, because the person who was living here was murdered two
months ago. Which is another reason I find this story of a phantom tenant a little hard to credit.”

“She was murdered in the flat?” Vacher shrieked.

“No. But she was present in the flat on various occasions, as I said earlier.”

“This is dreadful. The poor girl … But she hadn't been squatting, there was no forced entry? Nothing damaged?”

“The place is immaculate. There's not so much as a fingerprint.”

“But I don't get it. A.C.I. didn't get in touch with me, something they usually do if they've rented out one of my properties. Honestly, I don't …”

“A.C.I.? And who are they?”

“Aquitaine Conseil Immobilier. They're reliable people, they manage all my properties. You have to understand, when you're a property owner …”

“Thierry Lataste runs the company, doesn't he?”

“Yes, he's the managing director. Do you know him?”

“A little.”

Vilar cut short the conversation so he could calmly think things through. Before hanging up, Vacher expressed the hope that all this was not going to cause him any problems. Vilar reassured him, slipped the mobile back into his pocket and stared, without really seeing, at the two technicians packing away their equipment.

“We haven't got much,” Lopez said. “Couple of hairs, half a thumbprint … We ran the forensics vacuum to pick up any trace evidence, but I tell you, I'd like the telephone number of their cleaning woman, I'd give her a couple of hours' work around my house. Even cleaned the U-bend, if you can believe that.”

When they were gone, Vilar sat on the edge of the bed and looked around him at the banal décor: the wall at the head of the bed plastered with a huge poster of mountains, the thin, rough, royal blue carpet, the two armchairs upholstered in bottle-green velvet.

He stood up and covered the bed that his colleagues had unmade in order to run the vacuum cleaner. A telephone rang and rang
somewhere in the building, but no-one answered. Outside the window he saw a small courtyard with a climbing rose. Virginia creeper covered one wall. Somewhere a pigeon was cooing. Vilar looked up at the misty sky where the sun was already beginning to swelter. The room was pervaded by a vague smell of dust, dirty laundry and other things he did not recognise. He tried to imagine how things would play out with Lataste, struggled to find the words that would shut him up, preferably in front of witnesses so he would be forced to back down. He called directory enquiries for the number of A.C.I. and dialled it to make sure that Lataste was there.

He was working in his glass-walled office which looked out onto five or six cubicles, divided with partitions, within which people were busy making money for the business. He recognised Vilar immediately, blushed and leapt to his feet to come and meet him, hand outstretched, a cardboard smile pasted on his face. The policeman was about to take out his I.D. when Lataste moved to stop him, assuring him that he recognised him, that there was no need, glancing around him, but Vilar ignored the gesture and flashed his warrant card. “Commandant Vilar, police,” he said, and felt a wave ripple around the office and in each cubicle voices dropped to a whisper or fell silent, the click of fingers on computer keyboards slowed.

Lataste led him into his office and closed the door. He offered Vilar a seat, sat down himself and the smile vanished from his face like a mask that had suddenly crumbled to dust.

“What's going on?” he said.

He seemed genuinely worried. He was better at feigning panic than nonchalance and Vilar felt like wiping the stage make-up from his face.

“Did I hear you right?” he said. “You're asking me what's going on?”

“Of course! You show up here unannounced, let everyone know you're with the police, trying to embarrass me a little more, so I think I've got the right to know why, don't you?”

Vilar stared at him hard, at once puzzled and astonished. He did not know whether this guy had the nerve of a true gangster or whether he was completely reckless and stupid.

“Are you familiar with a studio apartment at 145 cours Balguerie belonging to Monsieur Jean-Philippe Vacher? I'm guessing you remember Nadia Fournier, with whom you had a relationship for several months and who was murdered early in June? Well, this is what's going on: we've just discovered that Nadia was using that studio flat to meet clients, because as I'm sure you're aware she frequently worked as a prostitute. And we discovered that she paid no rent for that studio flat because, apparently, it was provided to her by Aquitaine Conseil Immobilier. And since I suppose you are the only person at A.C.I. who knew her, I have inferred, somewhat simplistically I'll grant you, that you may have, let's say, committed a breach of normal practice in your profession and loaned this studio, located in a building managed by you, to Nadia, so that you could meet her there and so that she could more easily carry on her professional activities. Do you have any comment you would like to make? Have I made any mistakes, left anything out?”

He reeled off this long speech without pause, knowing that in doing so he was suffocating Lataste. The man had slumped back in his seat, arms clamped to the armrests, and was staring at the calendar hanging on the wall behind Vilar.

“Monsieur Lataste?”

“No, no mistake. It's all true.”

He took a paperclip from the desk which he began bending and twisting.

“So what's the problem?” he asked after a few seconds.

Vilar shivered. An ominous shudder ran down his back and through his limbs. He wanted to step around the desk and slap this son of a bitch. Or maybe smash his face. Violently. Leave him bruised and battered on the floor, blood streaming from his mouth, his nose broken. He took a deep breath then got to his feet and opened the door.

“The problem,” Vilar said in a loud, clear voice, “is that in the eyes of the law you are a pimp. To be more precise, you are the pimp of a murdered woman and that makes you an obvious suspect. And there's more: I believe you lied to me during our first interview to conceal the
fact you were implicated in this murder. That's the problem. So now, you're going to get up and come with me to the police station where I plan to detain you for questioning. Now, Monsieur Lataste, I'd be grateful if you could come with me without offering any resistance.”