Talking to Ghosts (7 page)

Gradually the children got up and left the room in twos and threes, stacking their plates on a trolley as they went. After a while Victor found himself sitting alone at his table: at some signal known only to them, the two boys had jumped up from their chairs in perfect unison and cautiously walked away, carrying their plates and their glasses in front of them like holy relics. Then, like the others, they too disappeared through a doorway from which Victor could hear shouts and laughs, fists banging on walls and the scrape of tables or chairs. Soon he heard the voice of a television presenter, intercut with snatches of music, applause and adverts. Standing in the corner, the social workers were smoking and talking in low voices. From time to time they laughed, covering their mouths as though they were shy. Victor noticed that apart from him there was only one boy still at his table: the tall boy who had giggled earlier when Victor arrived, and was now bent double. He looked as if he was asleep, his head resting on his folded arms. Or maybe he was crying, because every now and then his body shook.

Victor got down and stacked his plate and cutlery on the trolley. His fork fell on the floor, and the noise made the three adults turn and stare. They did not take their eyes off him until he had left the room.

Four boys were playing table football, cheered on by two more who promised they were going to thrash the winners. The game was tense,
the players punctuating their furious wrist flicks with muttered obscenities directed at nothing and no-one in particular.

Victor stepped closer and watched the game for a few minutes. The ball flew off the table and bounced at his feet. He caught it as it bounced and gently tossed it back to one of the players, but the boy did not thank him, in fact he did not seem to notice the newcomer standing silently a few feet away. Other boys were watching the television, sometimes mocking the adverts that all seemed to feature beautiful women, fast cars, and jewels in sumptuous settings. Victor wandered away from the table football and slowly walked around the room. The two brothers were staring spellbound at the television, though they were sitting some way back, lolling in armchairs, methodically picking their noses, rolling the snot into little balls and flicking it into the distance. The dark-haired brother was still regularly poking out his tongue as if, like a snake, he could use it to sense the universe of smells around him. The boys' restless feet were constantly scuffing the floor, twitching or quivering convulsively in a continuous fidgeting that spread to every part of their bodies except their round, staring eyes, which remained glued to the television in the distance.

Victor turned away, walked over to the window and stood there. He watched a group of sparrows squabbling over food on the lawn beneath a big oak tree. They hopped about, pecked at each other, and flew up suddenly into the dark leaves, only to drop down heavily onto the other birds. All around the light was blinding and brutal, from the metallic glare of the sky to the short grass that was yellowing in patches, and everything seemed transfixed by the stultifying heat. Even Victor did not move, he stood stock-still as beads of sweat began to trickle down his face and onto his neck. He did nothing to wipe them away, even though he found the warm tickling sensation uncomfortable, and then his eyesight misted, his eyelids twitched feverishly and suddenly snapped shut, as he slumped to the floor and started to vomit, eyes closed, clutching his stomach, breathless and seized by convulsions.

*

He was woken by an angry blackbird, slicing across the rectangle of the open window with a dark caw. Or perhaps it was the cold contact of the stethoscope against his skin. A man with a worried look was sounding the depths of his body. He gave a smile when he saw the boy open his eyes. He inflated the blood-pressure cuff and checked the dial, intent on the sounds that only he could hear. He told Victor everything was fine, and smiled again. It was just an after-effect, he said, and stood up, his face suddenly disappearing from view. Victor blinked in surprise. The doctor said he was going to give him an injection to help him relax, and asked if that was O.K. The boy's eyelashes fluttered and, unblinking, he watched the needle slide into a vein in his arm and the plunger of the syringe slowly being depressed.

When someone came to fetch him for dinner, he was roused from the half-sleep he had been drifting in all afternoon, twisting and turning on the sheet that stuck to his clammy body. He wondered what time it was, but his watch was sitting on a shelf and he did not dare ask this man who was trying to persuade him to come and eat something. Victor refused to go downstairs, his only response was to turn away, curl up into a ball and pull the sheet over his head. He stayed for some time beneath this pale blue shroud, in the hush of his faint breathing, aware of the dim glow that seeped through the fabric, looking at his fingers, wriggling these tame, secret creatures, his lips moving, mouthing words with a faint hiss of saliva creating a confused counterpoint to the birdsong that came in random bursts from outside. Then he shifted in the bed, sat up and looked around, eyes puffy with sleep, at the peaceful haven of his room. He reached out, pulled his backpack towards him and began to make an inventory. Apart from a few clothes, the police had packed a little Walkman that had belonged to his mother, and a handful of cassettes by old-fashioned singers. He rummaged for his MP3 player but could not find it, so picked up the Walkman again, examining it from every angle. He ran his finger over the buttons, then pressed
EJECT
and extracted the cassette, which he also examined, turning it over and over, probably because it had no label. He reloaded it into the little red player, put on the earphones, and pressed
PLAY
.
Nothing happened. He shook the device, took out the tape, reinserted it and closed his eyes. Still there was no music, the tape did not move. He opened his eyes and noticed the battery compartment was empty. He poked a finger in to be sure, then tossed the Walkman onto the bed, leapt to his feet and paced the room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, then stood at the window and stared out at the heat haze that stained the sky with a sickly grey-green veil, even as the patches of shadow spreading at the foot of the walls announced that night was drawing in. In the distance he could hear the low roar of the motorway. The warm air quivered with the metallic breath of the city.

*

Victor stood for a long time, finding it now possible to remain utterly still but for the deep and steady rise and fall of his breath, the quivering of his eyelids that made his face seem alive, and the anxious curiosity of his eyes searching out everything there was to see: there was not much, trees, birds, a few insects, buzzing specks against the evening light.

A loud crash from the corridor behind him made him start. It sounded like someone banging on his door. He went to open it and peered into the dark, empty hallway. He could hear muffled laughter from behind a door beneath which a band of light flickered with shadows. The cold wooden floor creaked with every step. On his right he could see a bright room and the faint sound of water dripping. Warily he stepped inside, as though walking into a trap tiled in white and blue. He walked past a line of washbasins, peered into the shower cubicles, the toilets, then locked himself into a cubicle to pee. As he was doing up his flies the door of the next cubicle slammed shut, he heard a sigh of relief and a series of intimate splashes and almost immediately the foul stench reached him. The toilet flushed. The door banged so hard that it shook the thin partitions separating the cubicles. As the stranger left the bathroom he burped and started to whistle a shrill, unfamiliar tune, then there was the squeak of hinges and the click of a latch. Victor waited until everything was silent; only then did he
emerge and creep back to his room, terrified that one of the other doors might open, distracted by the snatches of music that faded away and died in the twilight.

He lay on the bed again, staring at the ceiling, watching as night drew in, darkening the pale rectangle of sky he could see through the window. The room around him was sketched in mauve and grey with patches of blue shadow in the corners. He laid a hand on his chest and felt his heart beat, and in his head he felt the same dull throb, buzzing like an insect. He did not see the darkness finally take hold, because by then he was snuggled up with his mother, naked and warm as she stroked his hair, whispering softly to him –
my little boy, my darling
– sweet nothings scarcely louder than a breath and planting kisses all over his face. He let himself melt into this dark embrace, pressed his body and his face into the soft mattress, groaning, shifting listlessly, suddenly overcome with suffocating sleep.

Then he fell. A short, brutal jolt that woke him with a start. He found himself on his back, his arms flung wide, his legs tangled in the sheets, gasping with terror. He shook the hem of his T-shirt to dry the sweat from his skin, kicked out to free his legs, and opened his eyes onto the darkness. When he felt calm again he got up, walked over to the window, and pressed his face against it. A rustling silence. The day's clamour all but gone. A perfumed coolness rose from the grounds. A steady breeze, calm and gentle. The mute breath of hidden flowers. A faint shushing of leaves broke the silence. He looked at the sky, trying to make out the stars as they glided towards the west. He hoped there might be a comet, hoped he might see the moon, but could make out nothing save the perpetual pulse that seemed to keep everything alive. He shivered suddenly. He had been taught that the universe was cold and utterly black, streaked with ancient light and rocks no-one had thrown. He dismissed this paradox, which was too difficult for him to resolve, and with clumsy, groggy hands undressed and went back to bed, quickly slipping back into restless sleep.

Questioning the staff at S.A.N.I., Vilar discovered that Nadia's coworker – and probably her friend – was a woman named Sandra de Melo: the pair had been hired at about the same time and had been assigned to work on the same team. The executives and the line managers he interviewed talked about the staff as if they were interchangeable, as though they were pack animals, and it took considerable effort to get any personal information about the young woman who had been working for their company for almost four years. Some fell silent the moment they heard that Nadia had been murdered, while others seemed more than happy to be “helping the police with their inquiries”. Vilar had a nagging suspicion that some of them imagined themselves playing a role in a crime novel. It hardly mattered since the management, in spite of all its talk of proper procedures, could barely disguise its disdain for “human resources” – despite having been given an award by the Chamber of Commerce the previous year. One interesting fact did emerge – Nadia only worked part-time, and her shifts were irregular.

The rumour that the two women had been friends came from the team leader responsible for training them when they joined. The man had nothing but praise for their work, and stressed what a pleasure it had been to work with two beautiful, sexy women. Vilar had loathed the man's knowing smiles and his studied pauses, the tacit male bond this moron thought he had established between them.

Sandra de Melo lived out in the
banlieue
sandwiched between the motorway and the train tracks in a forbidding tower block on a bleak
housing estate that some architect had tried to jazz up with wrought-iron balconies painted in garish colours. A boy leaning in the doorway barely moved to let Vilar pass. Another was leaning against a window crazed with cracks, and a third was sitting smoking on the stairs next to the lifts. The air reeked of dope. As he reached the middle of the lobby the policeman felt their eyes boring into him, but he ignored them as he tried to make out the illegible labels on a bank of mailboxes, some of them padlocked – those that still had a metal door to protect their post.

“You looking for someone?” a voice said behind him.

S. de Melo. Apartment 317
. The mailbox was stuffed with junk mail.

“I'm talking to this fucker, you'd think he'd fucking answer?”

Vilar felt an electrical charge trill through his shoulder blades and spread up into his neck making his hair stand on end. He turned towards the boy who had spoken, the one still standing by the door.

“It's O.K., I've found her. Didn't want to tax your brain.”

He forced himself to smile. The boy kept his hands in the pockets of his white shell suit. He was probably about sixteen or seventeen, like his mates. The one sitting on the stairs dropped his joint and stubbed it out with his trainer, his head lowered, observing Vilar from under his baseball cap.

“It can be pretty dangerous here,
m'sieur
,” the boy said, leaning against the window. “On the stairs and that. Even in the lift, when it's working. There's thugs here who get a kick out of scaring people.”

The other two nodded in agreement, mocking Vilar, waiting for him to react.

“It's pretty scary,” Vilar said, rolling his eyes as if he meant it, taking in the walls tagged with graffiti. “You guys must be really brave to hang out here, what with it being so dangerous.”

“Yeah, it's not safe,” said the boy who had been smoking the joint. “But the Feds never come here, the fuckers.”

“There's never a policeman around when you need one,” Vilar said, nodding. “Why don't you give them a call?”

All three burst out laughing.

“Guy's a comedian.”

“Don't got their number,” the guy in the white hoodie said.

“Well then, our hands are tied,” Vilar said.

He took a few steps towards the stairs. It felt hard to breathe, as though he were trekking high up in the mountains. He tried to catch his breath, only to feel a painful, familiar weight pressing on his chest.

“Hey, mister comedian, you wouldn't be busting our balls there, would you?”

Vilar turned to the guy in the shell suit, who was standing in the middle of the hall, his legs apart, gesturing defiantly. The dope smoker had also jumped to his feet and was standing on the bottom step. The third youth was still leaning against the window, his head back, watching carefully between half-closed lids.

Vilar looked from one to the other, sizing them up rapidly, mustering every ounce of willpower not to lay into them. He would have enjoyed it too much; he would have done his utmost to really hurt them. His muscles crackled with undirected electricity; his heart was thumping in his throat. He could feel his arms tensing at the thought of the pounding he would give them. He heaved a sigh.

“You'd have to have some balls for me to bust them,” he said at last.

He strode towards the lift. The smoker had lit a cigarette and was looking him up and down, his face screwed up, fag drooping from the corner of his mouth.

Vilar turned instead to the stairs. The boy there put out an arm to block his path, looming so close that Vilar could smell the dope on his clothes.

“Give me a break. I'm tired.”

He said it in a low voice, a lump in his throat, struggling to swallow the anger he could feel welling in him. The boy stepped aside and Vilar slowly started up the stairs, finally exhaling the stifling air trapped in his chest. When he reached the next floor, he stopped and looked along the grey corridor, blood pounding in his ears, distorting the silence.

The door was opened straight away. Sandra de Melo was a small, pretty woman with bronzed skin and large, dark, expressive eyes. When
he showed her his warrant card she nodded and smiled, explaining that Monsieur Dumas, her boss, had called to say he was coming. She led him down a corridor laid with wood-effect vinyl. The brown striped wallpaper that made him think of a mattress. A vacuum cleaner spilled its brushes and nozzles in the doorway to the living room, and the woman pushed them aside with her foot and told Vilar to sit where he liked as she tidied the magazines on a coffee table. He sat down on a leatherette sofa that creaked under his weight. Sandra took a seat opposite and lit a cigarette. She took a deep drag, her eyes half closed. She seemed nervous or tired, and was doing her best to hide it with lively gestures and the youthful smile that softened her features.

“I was doing some cleaning, just for a change … You timed it perfectly, I was just going to take a break. Do you fancy coffee? I've just made some.”

Vilar nodded, and she got up eagerly. As he listened to her bustling about in the kitchen, he looked around at the mismatched furniture and the widescreen television on mute, showing some American sitcom. As she came back with a tray with two cups, a cafetière and a porcelain sugar bowl, he thought he could hear a steady pounding on the wall. A soft hammering, rhythmic, muffled. Someone was hitting the wall. A neighbour, probably. Vilar had grown up in this kind of building, the constant noise from the neighbours, shouting, doors banging, televisions blaring late at night.

They drank their coffee without saying much. Vilar said it was good, and added that he knew people who could not make a decent cup of coffee, something he considered a serious failing. Sandra smiled, fluttering her eyelashes. The pounding on the wall, which had stopped for a moment, started up again.

“Sorry,” Sandra said, “I'll be back.”

Her face had suddenly tensed, she looked older, and Vilar heard her sigh wearily as she got to her feet.

He could hear her talking in the next room. She obviously had a child. Too young to go to school. Or sick, maybe. He got up, wandered over to the window and stared out at the grim geometry of the tower
blocks, the dreary rows of windows with their tiny balconies, almost all sprouting satellite dishes, all interchangeable even though the buildings had recently been repainted in pastel colours, with garishly coloured tubes and pipes designed to cheer up the entrances. Vilar suddenly thought of the Red Hand Gang, the three dim-witted nineteen-year-olds who had left two dead at a bank in Avignon. They had been caught because they stopped at a petrol station to try to wash the red ink off their hands after the dye pack exploded when they opened the booby-trapped strongboxes. They had burst into tears as they were handcuffed, snivelling about how they had only carried guns to scare people, how they never wanted any of this to happen, never wanted anyone to get killed – nor, obviously, to be arrested, something that had apparently brought their whole world crashing down around them. Did the architects of these hovels, and those who commissioned them, weep when they drove past them now? Or had they washed their well-manicured hands of them?

Sandra reappeared after a few minutes, holding the hand of a little boy who looked a lot like her, thin, almost scrawny, teetering on spindly legs. His dark eyes darted here and there without looking at anything, he blinked constantly, dazzled perhaps by the brightness of the room. Behind him he dragged a clown puppet.

“Meet José.”

Vilar said hello and waved, but the boy stared down at the grinning face of the clown.

“José,” his mother said. “See that man? He's a policeman, just like in the movies. An inspector, you know what that means? He arrests robbers and murderers. José, are you listening?”

The boy glanced up at her, then collapsed on the floor, a ragdoll clutching a puppet, as through his muscles had suddenly given out. He landed gently and lay there on the carpet, staring up at Vilar.

“Are you going to stay there? You don't want to come with me? What about him?” Vilar pointed to the clown. “What's his name?”

“That's Toto. He takes him everywhere. It was the first thing he ever really noticed. One day I was holding him in my arms and he started
covering Toto in kisses, and I was just relieved that for once he wasn't screaming and struggling. If he had kissed me, I couldn't have been happier.”

She blew José a kiss then sat down again opposite Vilar. She poured more coffee. Her hands trembled.

“I'm sorry about this. We missed the taxi this morning, so I have to look after him today, they weren't able to send another. And since I'm on my own … I'm sorry. I'm wasting your time.”

“Don't worry, it's no problem.”

She turned towards the boy and waved and smiled at him and still he lay on his side, his cheek resting on the clown's head, staring up at the policeman.

“Especially as you've come to talk about Nadia, the poor thing.”

“It's me who's come at a bad time. I hoped to talk to her family and friends at the funeral, but no-one came, so I've been forced to come bothering people at home to ask them questions. Did you know Nadia well?”

“We got on O.K., but I wouldn't say I knew her well. We had coffee sometimes, talked about our sons, about our problems … I wanted to come to the burial, sorry, I mean … she was cremated, wasn't she? But I didn't have the strength. I'm not good with that sort of thing.”

“No-one's good with that sort of thing.”

The woman sighed. She seemed to be thinking, searching for words.

“I can't stop thinking about Victor, the poor kid, he's all alone now.”

“Doesn't he still have a grandfather? Nadia's father.”

Sandra shook her head.

“I don't think she'd seen him in years. He lives somewhere near Aixen-Provence, I think. That's if he's still alive …”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, I mean … He might be dead, I don't know, she burned her bridges long ago. I don't think she really saw him after she ran away from home in her teens. Can I ask you something?”

She did not give Vilar time to reply.

“How did she die? What did he do to her?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Sandra blushed a bit, but held his gaze.

“Yes. It's important to know if she suffered. We might not have been close, but we talked a lot, we talked about our troubles, she'd come round to mine for dinner or we'd go to hers. Victor and José got on well. So yes, I really want to know whether they hurt her, even if I know it doesn't change anything.”

Her eyes were glistening. She poured herself another coffee, her movements halting, almost trembling.

“She was beaten and then strangled.”

Sandra de Melo nodded, sitting motionless, staring down at the cup in her hand. Vilar allowed her time to collect her thoughts, to imagine what Nadia must have suffered in her dying moments. When she raised her cup and sipped her coffee, he said gently:

“A minute ago you said something about her running away from home … Can you tell me a bit more about that?”

Sandra hesitated. She turned towards her son, who was crawling slowly towards the table, clutching his puppet.

“Yeah. She told me she left home when she was sixteen, that that's when her life went all to hell. Before that, things had been going really well, she was good at school. A bit like me, I did O.K. at school, I actually liked it. I even managed to get my
baccalauréat
. Anyway, long story short … She'd been really close to her mother – I think she was a teacher.”

“Her mother committed suicide, didn't she? Was that after Nadia left home? Because you said she ran away, but it sounds like she was really leaving for good. You said yourself, ‘she left home'. ”

“I don't know. I couldn't ask her. If I so much as mentioned her mother she'd end up crying. But her father, I don't know, it was like she hated him.”

Here was something interesting. The father was the only surviving member of the nuclear family. His daughter runs away, his wife commits suicide, and there he is, alone. What sort of state must he have been in? How does someone survive something like that? In his
notebook, Vilar scrawled half a dozen circles around the word “father”. Nadia would have been a minor at the time. There would have been a missing person's report. There might still be something on file.