Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre, Frank Wynne

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

With his son Pablo's kidnapping still unsolved, and his marriage ruined by the torment of hope, the brutal murder of a single mother in her own home is an almost welcome diversion for Commandant Vilar. The woman leaves behind a son, Victor, thrown into the foster system with only his mother's urn for company. Struggling with bullies, trauma and the first pangs of teenage love, Victor carries a secret that followed his mother to her grave. Struggling for leads, Vilar is shaken when the colleague investigating Pablo's kidnapping disappears. When a sadistic caller claims to have information about his son, Vilar is torn between duty and a desperate chance of redemption.

Release date: November 6, 2014

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 368

Sample

Often in the morning at about 11.15 he would park his car near the school, on the far side of the street, since from there he had a better view of the deserted playground with its chestnut trees and the classroom windows on the first floor. He could make out brightly coloured cut-out figures stuck to the windows, Christmas trees, animals and little men. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of the teacher, or a child’s hand going up, and then his heart would pound, he would feel a dry bitterness in his throat, he would swallow hard and force himself to blink, his eyelids stinging from staring for so long.

The first floor had four classrooms, but it was in the one with the fantastical menagerie galloping across its windows that Pablo had sat. Third desk, middle row, in the CM1 classroom. It was a nice room, its walls papered with children’s drawings, modern art posters, maps and photographs from all over the world, forming a sort of encyclopaedic fresco around the children.

One of Pablo’s drawings was pinned up on the back wall. He had seen it when he came into the classroom, afterwards. Pablo was always drawing. People said he was gifted. Painted on a square sheet of paper a metre across, you could easily see that it was a safari scene with lions, elephants, giraffes and antelopes … Two 4 x 4s were hurtling through the yellow grass in the middle of the painting; a huge blue rhinoceros was overturning a third vehicle with its horn, tossing its occupants into the air, spreadeagled like little frogs. He had immediately gone closer to appreciate the details, and couldn’t help smiling because the boy had given each of the hunters a particular expression – happy, terrified or gormless – and drawn beautiful eyes for the animals, some gentle, some savage.

He had smiled, then turned around to dry his eyes and stifle the sobs racking his chest. The following day the teacher had come to his house and handed him the drawing, rolled up like a parchment and tied with a red ribbon. He and Ana had managed to smile that evening as they pored over the painting spread out on the coffee table in the sitting room. They had run their fingers gently over the colours their son had painted, sometimes with bold, determined brushstrokes, sometimes with painstaking care to capture a zebra’s stripes, for example, or give a hunter a strange hat with a blue feather. Afterwards they had fallen asleep on the sofa, exhausted by tears and helpless attempts to comfort each other. Waking in the dead of night, they had slipped into bed but been unable to get back to sleep, both isolated by exhaustion.

At 11.30 the gates would open, and the children who didn’t take lunch in the canteen would start to trickle out. Parents would be waiting for them, mothers mostly, some of whom took charge of a whole brood of kids and slowly walked away surrounded by skipping or whining midgets. There were some men waiting, too, for the most part those practising the art of being a grandfather. Frozen, his hands clamped to the steering wheel, the man in the car would watch all this. Lying next to him on the passenger seat, hidden beneath a navy blue cloth, he had placed a 9mm pistol with a 15-round magazine, the first round already engaged in the barrel.

He kept a keen eye on the children who were unaccompanied by an adult as they walked away from the school. In his mind he urged them to hurry up, to run home while he studied the passers-by – there were few – and the cars that had to slow for the speed bump. He was tense, ready to jump from his own car, weapon in hand, and press the muzzle to the forehead of any guy he saw acting suspiciously around one of the kids, or to open fire on any car that stopped next to a child.

And then, when nothing happened, he drove off again, baffled with rage and grief, and headed back to work where he forced himself to deal with the violence of others which was everywhere, engulfing him, terrifying him, seeping unstoppably into his mind and pooling in the innermost recesses of his brain, adding to his inconsolable grief; nothing, it seemed, could staunch the flow of calls to the switchboard and the station, or all the screams, the blood, the contusions and the deaths those calls announced, all this endless misery, and it seemed to him that he could smell the rank sweat of a grubby, sick society the moment he set foot in the brand-new police station that backed on to the Chartreuse cemetery, a pompous white fortress where dark destinies were played out, tragedies enacted without footlights or curtain. It did not stick in his throat like the prison smell of men and burnt fat, no, it was more subtle, more insidious, filling his head until it nearly split.

The man’s name was Pierre Vilar. His son Pablo didn’t like having lunch in the canteen so as soon as he and Ana had decided that he was old enough – being almost ten – safely to walk the 400 metres from school to the house, they’d given in to him. A neighbour, Madame Lucien, looked after him and made his lunch. Pablo loved Madame Lucien and probably loved her boxer dog, Billy, even more. She would often go and fetch Pablo, when it rained, for instance. Sometimes Vilar or Ana would arrange to pick him up. It was seldom that the boy had to make the journey alone.

On 20 March 2000, a Tuesday, Vilar had been supposed to collect him, but he had been held up at the station and then there had been the accident on the boulevard: a fender-bender, one person slightly injured, he’d found out later, the sort of traffic jam you’ve forgotten about come evening. Vilar had pulled up outside the school at 11.38.

When he rang the doorbell at Madame Lucien’s and saw her face grow pale and her eyes widen with the question that exploded in her head at the same instant as in his – “Pablo’s not with you?” – he started to run towards the school following the same route he had taught Pablo twenty times over, but he did not find him in the street or at the school where there was a remote chance he could have been kept back for some minor misdemeanour or injury. He was clutching at straws, really, so as not to sink into panic, but even then he realised, he knew, in spite of the investigation that was immediately launched, an investigation that went on all day, went on for days, for weeks, without turning up anything despite the huge resources and dedication the police put into the search for a fellow officer’s son. He knew. But because people may know something and still not believe it, it felt as though the ground opened up beneath his feet that day, a yawning chasm that threatened to swallow him, and he was standing on a bridge of ice above it, sometimes drawn to the abyss.

Pablo had vanished on the corner of a street where a car had turned, a car with metallic paint, grey maybe, or green, or sky-blue, a Peugeot, or maybe a Citroën, driven by a man – on this last point the four witnesses agreed.

After that, Pierre and Ana forgot what it meant to sleep, to eat, to smile, to love each other. At night they collapsed onto the mattress and sank into a mindless stupor from which they awoke exhausted and with aching heads. They shovelled food into their stomachs and digested it. Their faces became cardboard masks, animated by involuntary, polite, expected expressions, and then gradually etched with deep wrinkles like shifting fault lines.

They no longer thought to look at each other, to whisper pointless tender words, to reassure each other even though they did not believe in reassurance, to lie to themselves just for the pleasure of tasting the lie’s illusory flavour, delicious and deceptive like the taste of an acid drop, merely so they could stay upright a little longer. They no longer touched, no longer knew the taste of each other’s tears on their faces, forgot to hug each other to stifle their sobs and calm them.

They could not find each other, because Pablo had not been found.

Vilar got into the habit of going back to the school, as soon as he could, in the irrational hope of surprising the kidnapper, of seeing him, seeing his face appear on the street or in a car. He will come. He will be there, hunched in his car seat, and when the kids come out he will start the car and he will waylay one of them. He will do it again. And I will be there.

He knew this vision was lunatic, it was madness. It was his job to know. He knew how much his obsession was damaging him too, felt himself cracking a little more every time, felt his strength being sapped. But on the rare occasions when he found the willpower to give up his stake-out he felt a deep, all-pervading, exhausting pain, an aching absence that overwhelmed him, a pain he sometimes wanted to dig out of his body with a knife. He tried to talk about it to those around him, but he saw that he frightened people, saw them back away too, from this contagious evil that might rouse the fears coiled in the back of their minds like hibernating snakes.

Two years later, during a difficult arrest, he opened fire on a suspect. The bullet lodged between two vertebrae. It was successfully removed, and the victim benefited by having his case dismissed and being awarded six months in a nursing home. The internal investigation proved beyond doubt that the shooting was not justified by any mitigating circumstance, by imminent threat or legitimate self-defence. The policeman’s nerve had probably failed him. Vilar admitted that the guy, a stocky thug with a long rap sheet who was known always to carry a weapon and shoot at the first sign of trouble, and was suspected of having gunned down two security guards and a policeman, wasn’t worth the bullet he’d taken. The policeman’s grave error was solemnly condemned but the inquiry was unwilling to punish him further, given the tragedy he had lived through, was living through still, if he could be said to be living. He was compulsorily referred to a psychiatrist, but after several sessions the two men acknowledged that nothing could be said or done that would make it possible for him to accept the unacceptable, to ease this bereavement without there being found a body. They parted courteously, each thanking the other for what little they had learned.

Vilar swore to himself that he would never again carry a gun on duty, in spite of the regulations.

Except when he came to park outside Pablo’s school and stalk shadows.

Victor plunged into the darkness of the shuttered house, struggling to close the door behind him as though repelling some intruder trying to force his way across the overheated threshold. When he had finally managed to shut out the blinding sunlight, he sighed with relief. He slipped off his little red rucksack, the straps pulling at the neck of his T-shirt, baring a thin, tanned shoulder that he quickly covered up again. Without bending to untie the laces, he kicked off his trainers and smelled his bare, sweating feet. The cold tiles made his toes curl. He walked gingerly, leaving a trail of damp footprints that instantly faded, heading for the kitchen which reeked of stale tobacco smoke and bleach. Dust swirled in two shafts of sunlight streaming through the venetian blinds. He trailed his hand through the warm gold dust, sowing silent, microscopic confusion. In the fridge he found a can of cold cola and opened it, closing his eyes at the hiss of carbon dioxide, drinking in long gulps, leaning back against a cupboard, then screwing his face up and burping suddenly. He stepped back into the hall which ran the length of the house connecting the two small gardens. He noticed that the door to his mother’s room was ajar. That meant she was alone, and he called out to her as he approached.

His dull, muffled voice met with a smothering silence that absorbed it like water. She must be asleep. She often took a nap in the heat of the day when she was at home. He pushed open the door and at first could see nothing in the dim light that came through the closed shutters. He could smell nothing but a musky odour of sweat mingled with lily of the valley perfume. He saw the rumpled bed, the sheets and blankets piled on the mattress. He saw the torn curtain hanging by just two or three rings from the rod. He saw the panties on the floor, the small television upended.

And, sticking out from the other side of the bed, his mother’s bare feet. He felt a stabbing pain and something inside him shrivelled and ran dry instead of bleeding out. It was not his heart or his brain, but something deep and vital, some secret life force unknown to science. He took another step and saw her lying on her back, completely naked, one arm lying across her stomach, a silver ring glittering on the slim fingers that rested on the curve of her hip. He called to her again softly, but she did not answer, and he moved closer the better to see her now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness.

He knelt down.

Her face had a blueish tinge, the whole right-hand side swollen from temple to jawbone. Her cheek was cut and puffy, one eye swollen shut and almost black. Her brow bone had been shattered, and the blood that had trickled down was drying on her jaw, around her ear, on her neck. Blood had clotted in her ear, hardening to form an ugly black scab. There was blood on the pillowcase and on the sheets. Her lips were swollen and slashed and hung open to reveal her tongue poking through shattered teeth.

Victor searched in this ruined visage for his mother’s face, but he recognised only her left eye, the long curling lashes, the pupil cloudy and unmoving, staring but now sightless.

He could barely bring himself to look at her body, which was a constellation of bruises. On her breasts, on her ribs. One leg was black from knee to groin.

He got to his feet again and stood there for a few seconds, hands clasped behind his neck. Now and then he could hear a car passing in the street, and the silence that followed was all the more devastating. He crouched down, grasped his mother’s body under the armpits and lifted her, staggering back with the weight and bumping into the wall behind him. He stayed leaning against it to catch his breath and summoned all his strength. He adjusted his grip and the mutilated head lolled against his arm and in that moment he almost screamed, but gritted his teeth and shed silent tears as, step by step, he dragged the body to the bed, her heels scraping across the carpet with a dull rasp. He grunted and grimaced from the effort and from grief, then finally felt the edge of the mattress against his legs and collapsed onto it, the body falling on top of him, his dead mother’s head between his thighs; he wriggled out, contorting himself so that he could pull the legs onto the bed, then, finally, got to his feet again and pulled her arms, managing to lay her out more or less naturally and prop a pillow under her head.

He tried to catch his breath, his heart pounding, sweat dripping from his chin, and took deep breaths, bent double, his hands on his legs, a trickle of snot hanging from his nose because every breath came out as a sob.

He stood up straight, wiped his mouth and chin with the back of his hand and drew a sheet over his mother who now looked as though she were asleep, then wiped the sweat from his neck, leaned over the body and stroked this mother’s face; he pressed his fingertips to her eyelids but could not bring himself to close them because there was a fixedness in her stare that he could not comprehend, so he traced a finger over her battered lips, over her teeth, then, holding his breath, he gently kissed her forehead. He stepped back from the bed and stood for a moment, arms dangling by his sides in the middle of the room, listening to the buzzing of an invisible fly. Standing stock-still, his mouth open, he tried to take a deep breath, struggling to swell his scrawny chest.

A car passing outside made him start and shook him from his trance. He went and sat on the swivel stool in front of the dressing table, stared at the lifeless body, the glistening eyes, then turned to look in the mirror, hoping to see his mother’s image come alive again. He stared at the dressing table, cluttered with women’s things, perfumed and gleaming: brushes, bottles, tubes, expensive-looking packages, jewellery that glittered like gold. He pressed his palms to his cheeks, pulled his eyelids downwards, distorting his face, in an effort to make it seem grotesque or monstrous. Gurning into the mirror, he seemed ageless. Already too old, or forever trapped in this day, imprisoned in this grim moment. He took the rings lying on the dressing table and slipped them on his fingers, stretching his hand out to admire the effect, but the half-light of the room dulled any sparkle so he took them off, having to tug at the ones that were too tight. Then he trailed his fingers over the pots of creams, the lipsticks, brought the soft makeup brushes to his face and the feeling – like small docile animals – made him shudder. He sat for a long time staring at this collection of beauty products, carefully, painstakingly going through the vanity cases and soundlessly replacing everything, spraying perfumes at the mirror which mingled in the sultry heat to form a mist of heady scents.

He opened drawers, rummaging in them at random, aimlessly taking out brushes, combs, tweezers, hair slides, a whole paraphernalia, then sat for several minutes absorbed in untangling the hair caught in them and winding it gently around his fingers, then unwinding it and trying to shake it off, but the auburn threads clung to his damp skin and for a moment he struggled in silence, almost breathless from the effort. Eventually he rubbed his hands vigorously and went on exploring the contents of the drawers. He unearthed a tube of tablets and made out the words “DO NOT EXCEED THE PRESCRIBED DOSE” in red letters, and slipped the tube into his pocket.

He spun around to face the empty darkness, almost falling off the stool as he did so. He stared at the body laid on the bed, lying tangled and bloody in the pale sheets. He got up and ran to the kitchen, filled a large glass with water, and in three goes gulped down the tablets in the tube, shaking his flushed face after each swallow. Then he closed the windows and shutters tight, shot home the bolts, ripped the phone out of the wall and, putting a pillow under his head, he lay on the floor next to the bed in the place where he had found her. He reached up, slid a hand under the sheet and clasped his mother’s hand. He quickly drifted into unconsciousness, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, and did not feel the blowflies that landed on his skin, rubbing their front legs together and flying off again, heavy and buzzing, towards what really attracted them.

*

A face loomed over him, shining with sweat, eyes wide, the nose and mouth covered with a white mask. Someone slapped his cheeks, he heard voices, then saw the faces around him, all wearing masks, and imagined he was in hospital on an operating table. The voices were muffled, indistinct, and the faces of these people circled around, a languid merry-go-round with him floating at the centre, weightless and unreal. He closed his eyes again, but a blue dazzle played on his closed eyelids, a lightning flash that burned into his brain. A hoarse cry brought him round and he saw the sunlight spilling over the bright white ceiling, on which amorphous shadows danced.

The man was still bent over him, raising his eyelids to inspect the pupils. He shone the harsh beam of a tiny flashlight into his eyes. “He’s coming round,” a voice said. Victor tried to turn his head, but immediately felt a cold stiffness in his neck, and the merry-go-round of shadowy figures whirled before his eyes. He felt a blood-pressure cuff press against his skin, to be almost immediately removed again. He felt someone grab him under the armpits and watched as the room righted itself, everything suddenly stopped spinning, and the scene froze into a tableau, men peered down at him in pity or in shock, and he looked from face to face at their masks and their huge eyes all turned on him, seeming to hold him upright like invisible poles held out to a drowning man. He heard a voice whisper in his ear, asking if he was alright, if everything was alright, but he didn’t know what to say because in that moment he was not sure he would ever again be able to speak to anyone, would ever be able to utter anything other than a groan or a wail. But the voice was insistent, and a face surged up from behind him, moving into his field of vision, and then he turned his head, or rather bowed it, and managed to shrug.

The memories flooded back just as the stench of decomposition reached his nerve endings, as one by one they reawakened, and he stumbled hesitantly towards the bed hidden behind three men in surgical masks, wearing latex rubber gloves and white overalls. He stumbled and had to stop, and felt hands at his sides ready to hold him upright. Bewildered he stared down at the tube from the drip attached to his arm, then walked one, two, three steps, seeming to defy the bustling officers who had not moved. Once more a brutal silence fell over the room, the only sounds were ragged breaths and coughs, and as a car passed in a deafening roar that streamed through the window half open against the heat of the day, the boy lurched forward and fell at the foot of the bed on which lay a woman he no longer recognised, her skin mottled and blue, her face swollen, her lips curled into a rictus of horror, as though aware of what she had become. He had fallen on his knees and now raised himself to the height of the mattress, staring directly between the slightly parted legs, leaning against the foot of the bed, and his stomach lurched uselessly, unable to vomit up this dread which would be forever lodged inside him like some bird of prey. The men pulled him back, advising him to come away, but he struggled, grabbing the sheets so tightly they had to prise his fingers open one by one and drag him from the room in a soft murmur of soothing words and reassurances until, as he reached the front doorstep bathed in sunlight, he passed out, scratching his arms on the climbing rose.

*

Everything was white. The ceiling, the walls. A woman in a white coat was staring at him, her hands in her pockets. She smiled and told him he had been asleep for two days, that he was much better now, then she asked if he needed anything. When he said nothing, she came over and sat on the bed, listened to his chest, tested his reflexes with a small round hammer. The boy simply lay there, watching her perform these tests, and his eyes betrayed nothing, they simply shimmered, wide-eyed, taking in everything that he covered up in unfathomable depths. The woman got to her feet and looked down at him for a few seconds, still smiling, until he turned away, looking out of the window where the tips of poplar trees glinted in the sun.

“There’s someone who wants to talk to you. He’s with the police. He wants to ask you some questions about what happened. Is that O.K.?”

Since he remained silent, the woman turned and signalled to someone to come in. A man stepped into the room and said hello, but the boy did not react. Victor looked him up and down, not daring to meet the policeman’s curious or astonished gaze. He had dark hair and was wearing a black sweatshirt, a jacket and light trousers. He quickly settled himself in a heavy chrome and faux-leather chair that scraped the floor unpleasantly.

The boy ignored him, allowing his gaze to wander to a corner of the room, as though he were looking for dust.

“Victor? Can we talk for a bit? I’m Commandant Vilar. I’m here to find out who …”

He trailed off as the boy looked up at him, his eyes black and glistening, blinking more quickly now.

“Can we talk? Is that O.K.?”

The boy nodded, then started to rub the scratches on his arm from the rose bush, idly ripping off the tiny scabs with his fingernails.

At first the policeman said nothing: he simply looked at the boy who was studying him out of the corner of an eye. They could hear a muted hum of activity from the hospital, a creak of doors, muffled shouts, laughter too, sudden bursts of women’s laughter that quickly died away into a grave chorus of deep voices. From his jacket pocket the man took a small notebook and a ballpoint that he clicked. Then, in a low, sometimes hesitant voice, he explained that he needed to find out more about his mother so that he could catch the person who had done this to her (this was how he put it, as though he were talking about a mugging, unable to bring himself to mention death, to mention the stench or the horror they had stumbled into two days before, choking back the urge to retch, swallowing their bile), maybe it was someone who knew her, someone the boy had met, or overheard, someone whose name might be familiar. He asked the boy to rack his brains, to go through every face, every name, anything the dead woman might have said, they really needed his help, he was their main witness, it was important that he make an effort, even if it wasn’t easy. He repeated his questions, rephrased them, weighing them down with superfluous words and convoluted phrases, interwoven with unspoken warnings, coughs and conciliatory gestures. Victor watched the man’s hands, like strange animals, puppets vainly waved about in order to distract him, but when at last the policeman fell silent, slightly out of breath, the boy said nothing, only let this invisible clock, humid and halting, mark out the time.

So the policeman reeled off the questions once more, in a low voice rephrasing them, leaning over the boy like a priest taking confession.

A quarter of an hour later the doctor came back, still smiling, and found herself mired in this oppressive rhythm of murmured questions that went unanswered, and that was more uncomfortable than if noone had spoken at all. After a short while, in the same low voice, she suggested to the policeman that he stop the questioning now because the boy was tired. Reluctantly, Vilar got to his feet and said goodbye. He held out his hand to Victor and, lifting a skinny arm, the boy shook it, his hand as limp as a spray of withered flowers.

The body lay huddled at the foot of a wall, the head resting on an arm, as though asleep. It had fallen in front of a sex shop whose brash neon colours turned the faces all around into shifting, sickly masks. The dead man had his back to the police, to the onlookers, to the cars that passed, slowing in the glare of the strobing blue lights, to the pool of blood trickling across the sloping pavement into the gutter which reflected the seedy, squalid lighting. The body had not yet been covered and, under the jacket and the rucked up T-shirt, the pale skin of the man’s lower back was visible. On the far side of the street passers-by hurrying towards the nearby train station lugging heavy bags and suitcases craned their heads, hoping for a glimpse of something in the scrum of police cars and the uniformed officers patrolling the crime scene.

Vilar pulled on a pair of latex gloves and crouched down in order to make out the man’s features, examine the wounds and determine cause of death. He noted a shallow gash below the right ear a few millimetres wide, which had not bled significantly. Lifting away the front of the stained denim jacket, he could see only a black Johnny Hallyday T-shirt, slashed in three places across the chest and soaked in blood that had already begun to clot. There was a stab wound to the left of the sternum. Vilar moved a latex-gloved finger tentatively over the gash, then withdrew it with a sigh.

The face was that of a man of maybe twenty-five. Short dark brown hair. Three days’ stubble. Delicate features. As he always did when he examined a body, Vilar watched intently for several seconds – motionless, holding his breath – for some shudder that might indicate that the victim was not quite dead, that there was yet something to be done, but of course nothing happened. Once again he cursed the illogical stubbornness that made him EJECT the evidence of his own eyes, the refusal to accept the inevitable that, some years earlier in a morgue, had made him scream at the pathologist to stop just as he was about to make an incision because he thought he noticed the pale fingers trembling on the stainless steel table. The pathologist had not seemed surprised and – out of kindness or pity – had smiled and explained that it sometimes happened to him too.

Vilar was the sort of man who did not resign himself to death, who felt that it could be conquered, could be eliminated. By force of will, through memory, or by summoning ghosts.

“Kevin Labrousse, born 8 July, 1979 in Villeneuve-sur-Lot,” a voice above his head said.

An officer from the brigade anti-criminalité who had been first on the scene was waving a wallet and a plastic I.D. card.

“Someone found it on the street, not far away. There’s some cash, forty euros, and a couple of photos, social security card, bank card, that kind of thing. We had a scout about for the knife, but we didn’t find anything.”

Vilar stared at the photograph the brigadier was holding, but the face smiling defiantly into the camera, chin slightly raised, no longer resembled the dead man. He gently pushed the hand away, got to his feet and took a small plastic bag from his pocket, into which the officer dropped the victim’s effects.

“There was someone with him, wasn’t there?”

“Some friend from work. He’s in shock. Over there in the ambulance.”

Vilar peeled off his gloves and walked over to the ambulance. He looked around for his partner, Lauren