The Beast of the Camargue (38 page)

“And the police never caught the one who did it!”

“No, never.”

“If you want my opinion, they can't have looked very hard.”

“Do you think so?”

“Definitely.”

“Maybe you're right.”

“Are you really a family member?”

“No, not really.”

“I see.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because that's where they should have looked. In her family.”

In a flash, de Palma pictured again the long nights spent going through statements. Everything had gone through the mill. The slightest testimony. The smallest clue. All the forensic evidence had been gathered, but in those days the police scientists new nothing about biological sampling.

“You're not from around here, are you?”

“No, I'm from Marseille.”

“I didn't know they knew people from Marseille.”

“You don't always know everything about everybody.”

His face clouded over, and she realized that she was intruding. He was thinking about Marceau, his old teammate in Paris who had
ended up in trouble. He did not blame him. He alone knew that Marceau had been a decent man right up till the end, despite the corruption, despite the tortured soul. Marceau had been an excellent marksman; he had won prizes. He could have killed de Palma three times. But he had not done so, no doubt in memory of Isabelle and this tragedy which had bound them together forever.

De Palma took a long look at Isabelle's face stuck there on the marble of her grave. She looked so like Ingrid that he felt shaken to his very roots. Isabelle and Ingrid, years apart. Almost a lifetime.

A violent pain shot across his forehead and spread out in his skull. He massaged his temples until the migraine abated.

Because that's where they should have looked. In her family
. He repeated the sentence to himself several times.

The old woman had disappeared at the far side of the cemetery, toward rue des Prairies.

He turned on his heels and walked back down rue de Bagnolet.

At the Saint-Michel terminus, a few steps away from police headquarters, he ordered a beer and telephoned Judge Brivet. A secretary answered and told him to call back. He gave her his number, name and rank. She promised to pass on his message.

Nowadays, Gilbert Brivet worked in the financial section in Paris. Twenty years before he had had the duty—a crushing one for a young magistrate—of dealing with the Mercier investigation. De Palma wanted to have a word with him, one old hand to another. Brivet must have almost reached retirement age.

The Baron had just ordered a second beer when his mobile rang.

“Michel? Gilbert here. How are you?”

“Fine, fine, and you?”

“Up to my neck in it as usual. But I can't complain. Can we meet?”

“That's why I called you.”

“Jesus, Michel, it's good to hear from you!”

“Same here.”

“Let's meet up at Les Chauffeurs, how about that?”

“It still exists?”

“Etienne's gone. He doesn't run the restaurant any more, but it's
still really nice. And, this evening, there shouldn't be too many people.”

Gilbert Brivet still looked like a choirboy. At over fifty, he had kept his youthful features despite his graying hair and life's little dramas. He was neither married nor divorced: no woman would stay with this eternal adolescent caught in the corridors of power.

From his student past, he had retained the manner of a scholar who knows everything about anything, capable of listing all the records he had ever listened to and the hundred of detective novels he had devoured. Although the hard knocks of destiny had given him a rather weatherbeaten appearance, which only added to his charm. As a magistrate he was fearsome and feared, one of the few who could make the political microcosm tremble with his accusations and sly leaks to the press.

When the Baron appeared in the doorway of Les Chauffeurs, Brivet stood up, almost knocking over the bottle of red wine in front of him.

“Well, well, well, Michel. What a turn-up!”

“Good evening, Judge.”

Brivet still had the same deep comma-shaped furrow that divided his forehead in half when he was happy or worried.

“While I was waiting, I did my sums. The two of us go back nearly twenty-five years now.”

“The Americans were leaving Vietnam. I remember it as if it was yesterday. With Maistre, we introduced you to a certain Marcel Gouffé. It was 8:45 and the end of his time in custody. He had admitted everything, the murder of his wife and the rest. During his questioning, we also watched shots of the chopper over the American embassy in Saigon. Yes, just like yesterday, my man!”

“Back then, you, Maistre and Marceau were a team of aces. What's become of them?”

“You haven't heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Marceau is dead.”

“Shit. But how was I supposed to know?”

“It was in all the papers. A month ago.”

“Fuck. I was on holiday in Africa.”

“It wasn't a happy end …”

The Baron took a menu from their waiter.

“He'd gone wrong, you know. He was up to his ears in dodgy deals. Not a pretty story.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

“Yes, quite. They killed him. But not in a decent way. Very indecent, in fact.”

Gilbert Brivet laid his pale eyes on the Baron, who was studying the menu. He weighed him up, as though trying to gauge the force of the knocks that his friend had received and those he had returned.

“What you're telling me is awful, Michel. He often used to come and see me. In fact, every time he came through Paris. He always called and we would meet up.”

“He shot at me.”

“What?”

“Three times. He shot at me three times.”

The Baron pronounced this last sentence rather like a suspect in custody, releasing some of the guilt that was weighing down on him.

“Hang on there, you're telling me that Jean-Claude Marceau took a shot at you … But …”

“You heard right.”

“Fuck.”

The Baron ordered a veal cutlet in a cream sauce with fries, just as he had done during all his years with the Paris police. He raised his eyes, and could almost see Marceau and Maistre in front of him. Marceau with his long locks and mustache like the singer Georges Moustaki, his idol at the time. Marceau who had been a socialist despite it all, a master at stakeouts, and capable of orchestrating an interrogation as if it was a dialogue scripted by Godard.

“It's odd to see you again like this, Michel. You turn up out of the blue, with your news of death … It makes me…”

Brivet's eyes misted over with misery and nostalgia. He trembled on his seat, like a young tree bracing its strongest branches against the north wind.

“But now you're with the finance squad, you're out of all that!”

“Yes, I am. But sometimes I miss the old days. I'm sorry we don't see more of each other.”

“That's my fault. I got married. Then I wanted to forget about Paris and my old life.”

“I think we've all been running away from the same thing.”

De Palma ordered two pastis.

“I visited her grave this afternoon.”

Brivet placed his elbows on the table and laid his chin on his interlaced fingers.

“And I wondered if …”

“Stop, Michel. There's no point going back over that now. Life just played us one of its rotten tricks that evening. On you, Maistre, Marceau and me. And as rotten tricks go …”

Brivet closed his eyes.

“If you only knew how many times I've played that thing over in my mind: usually it's not me who's on duty that night, usually I don't deal with cases like that. Jesus, it's the first time, and I'm too young. And instead of calling in an old hand to help me out, I decide to play magistrate …”

He gulped his pastis, put his glass on the table and spun the ice around for a moment.

“That's all you can say about the matter. We were there when we should have been somewhere else.”

“True. But the worst of it is that after that—well I've seen my share of cold meat, believe me. But, I don't know why, I've never been able to get her out of my head.”

The Baron trained his eye on his friend, who kept his own eyes fixed on the ice cubes he was still swirling in his glass.

“I went to check out the exhibits.”

“And?”

“They're still there. In the courts, they throw nothing away, odd as it might seem. I wondered if we might be able to get something out of the D.N.A.”

The Baron gestured to the waiter for two more glasses of pastis.

“That will be difficult! Both for the tests and for the comparisons.
The boys in the genetic labs are a pain in the ass.”

The magistrate's face was sad, his eyes humid.

“I don't know,” he said.

“I'm no longer involved in that kind of case and I never need them. In finance, all we deal with are figures.”

“But I can ask for comparisons to be made.”

“Even if you're not officially on the case any more?”

“Hang on, am I a cop or aren't I? All we have to do is justify opening the case again.”

“But that's the problem. Plus there's the fact that the bastard probably isn't even on record.”

“Who knows? More and more are getting caught like that.”

“Hmm,” said Brivet, sipping his pastis.

The magistrate concentrated on the menu for some time. The waiter came over. The Baron looked at his friend, who was hiding behind a list of dishes, prices and culinary descriptions.

“I'll have the same as you, the veal cutlet.”

“It's funny. They haven't changed the menu.”

“No, when the old boy left, they decided to keep the same style. And they were right. The place is packed every night.”

“I have the impression that it's still the same tablecloths …”

“They repainted the walls once. But with the same color. As for the tablecloths, I think it's nostalgia making you see things as before.”

“After that we used to go to Le Bus …”

“If only they'd known about that at court!”

“They knew, of course they did.”

“We once bumped into a lawyer there. Just once. Their sort didn't go to Le Bus because it was full of druggies. They preferred more upmarket joints.”

“Yes, Le Bus was full of gangsters … And boys from your home town too.”

The Baron turned his palms up toward the ceiling.

“And we didn't smoke only tobacco!”

The two cutlets arrived at the same time. The Baron stared at his fries swimming in cream.

“In fact, why on earth did we start eating here?” Brivet asked.

“It was my cousin who recommended the place. It was the last real wine and coal merchant in Paris. That's why.”

“It's a shame Jean-Louis isn't here.”

“He's a real Parisian, but you won't get him out of Marseille.”

“What about you, Michel?”

“I've asked to be transferred back here.”

Brivet put his knife and fork down on the wrong side of his plate, as though he was left-handed.

“You did what?”

“You heard me right! Last week, I asked to come back to the
Brigade Criminelle
in Paris. And I got Gégé to back up my request.”

“He's the chief of police now.”

“It helps to have friends.”

Brivet picked up his knife and fork.

“You're still the craziest person I've ever met,” he said, waving knife and fork in front of him.

Moracchini put down the headphones beside her Toshiba, the service laptop.

She read back the sentence she had just typed, then she frowned and blinked.

The beast is coming … The old witch will dance …

The number dialed belonged to Chandeler, to his office line. And the call had been made from a telephone box in the center of Tarascon.

The lawyer had absolutely insisted on his telephone being tapped and an investigation opened. The first call he had received was on Thursday, August 28, and the second on the 30th. The message which had just been recorded by the police computer was dated September 3.

The three calls had been made from boxes located within the triangle formed by Maussane, Tarascon and Arles. Moracchini had turned everything there upside down and examined everyone who was on police records for even the slightest misdemeanor: nothing.

The receivers of the telephones used had been sent to the forensics lab in Marseille for D.N.A. sampling. In theory, she should get the results the next day.

She had then sent a tape of the man's voice on September 3 to be analyzed by the scientific team in Ecully. The sound lab had taken its time before sending the following report:

The voice belongs to a person of male gender, aged from forty to fifty
.

The individual in question does not present any vocal
particularities or difficulties of pronunciation which would indicate an alien or someone of foreign origin. French is thus his mother tongue
.

The man tries to conceal his accent, but characteristics remain which would indicate that he speaks with a natural southern and more particularly Marseille accent; the manner of stressing the nasal consonants being typical of that region
.

We add that this person proves to be particularly clever at concealing his voice …

She put down the report, chose a lock of her hair and started plaiting it without taking her eyes off her computer screen.

That morning, she had called up de Palma. He was still in Paris and had not said when he would be back. He had sounded cold on the telephone, which had made her both sad and furious with herself. So she had decided to distance herself from him as much as possible. It had become obvious that she missed de Palma, and this growing dependency scared her.