"I just don't get it, Pierre. Why do you get yourself into messes like this? You were' watching the stadium, that's all, I really…" His voice faded out. Niémans remained silent.
"You're getting on," Rheims went on. "And out of your depth. The agreement we had was perfectly clear: no more action, no more violence…"
Niémans turned round and walked over toward his boss.
"Come on, out with it, Antoine. Why did you call me in here, in the middle of the night? You couldn't have known anything about this business when you rang me. So what's up?"
Rheims's shadowy figure did not budge. Broad shoulders, gray curly hair, head like a rock face. The build of a lighthouse keeper. For several years now, the chief superintendent had been running the Central Bureau for the Prevention of Trade in Humans – the CBPTH – a complicated name for what was, in fact, the head office of the vice squad. Niémans had first met him long before he had become installed behind this particular administrative desk, when they were two swift and efficient cops on the beat. The officer with the crew cut leant down and repeated:
"So, what's up?"
Rheims breathed in deeply:
"There's been a murder."
"In Paris?"
"No, in Guernon. A small university town in the Isère département, near Grenoble."
Niémans grabbed a chair and sat down opposite the chief superintendent.
"I'm listening."
"The body was discovered early yesterday evening. It had been stuck in between some rocks over a stream which runs along the edge of the campus. Everything points to a psychopath."
"What information do you have about the corpse? Is it a woman?"
"No, a man. A young guy. The university librarian, apparently. The body was naked. It bears marks of having been tortured: gashes, lacerations, burns…He seems also to have been strangled."
Niémans placed his elbow down on the desk. He fiddled with the ashtray.
"Why are you telling me all this?"
"Because I'm planning on sending you down there."
"What? Because of a murder? The boys in the local Grenoble brigade will rumble this killer within a week and…"
"Don't mess with me, Pierre. You know only too well that things are never as straightforward as they look. I've spoken to the magistrate. And he wants a specialist brought in."
"A specialist in what?"
"In murders. And in vice. He suspects a sexual motive. Or something along those lines."
Niémans stretched his neck toward the lamp and smelt the acrid burning of the halogen.
"You're holding something back, Antoine."
"The magistrate's Bernard Terpentes. An old buddy of mine. We're both from the Pyrenees. And, between you and me, he's in a total panic. Plus, he wants to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible. Stop any rumors, the media, all that bullshit. The new academic year starts in a few weeks and we've got to wind things up before then. Get the picture?"
The superintendent stood up and went back to the window. He stared down at the luminous pinpricks of the street-lights and the dark mounds of the park. The violence of the last few hours was still pounding in his temples: the hacking of the machete, the ring road, the chase across Roland-Garros. For the thousandth time, he thought how Rheims's phone call had certainly stopped him from killing someone. He thought about his uncontrollable fits of violence, which blinded his conscience, ripping apart time and space, causing him to commit outrageous acts.
"Well?" Rheims asked.
Niémans turned back and leant on the window frame.
"I haven't been on a case like this for four years now. Why me?"
"I need someone good. And you know that a central office can pick one of its own men and send him anywhere in France." His huge hands did five-finger exercises in the darkness. "I'm making the most of my little bit of power."
The officer smiled behind his iron-rimmed glasses.
"You're releasing the wolf from its cage?"
"Put it that way, if you want. It'll be a breath of fresh air for you. And I'll be doing an old friend a good turn. And, in the meantime, it'll stop you from beating up on people…"
Rheims picked up the gleaming pages of a fax that lay on his desk. "The gendarmes' first conclusions. So is it yes, or no?" Niémans went over to the desk and crumpled the roll of paper. "I'll phone you. To get the news from the hospital."
The superintendent immediately left Rue des Trois-Fontanot and returned home to Rue La-Bruyère in the ninth arrondissement. A huge, almost empty flat, with an old lady's immaculate polished floor. He had a shower, dressed his – superficial – wounds and examined himself in the mirror. A bony, wrinkled face. A gleaming gray crew cut. Glasses ringed with metal. Niémans smiled at his appearance. He wouldn't have liked to bump into himself down a dark alley.
He stuffed a few clothes into a sports bag, slid a 12-caliber Remington pump-action shotgun in between his shirts and socks, as well as some boxes of cartridges and speedloaders for his Manhurin. Finally, he grabbed his protective bag and folded two winter suits into it, along with a few brightly patterned ties.
On the way to Porte de la Chapelle, Niémans stopped at the all-night McDonald's on Boulevard de Clichy where he rapidly swallowed two quarter pounders with cheese, without taking his eyes off his car, which was double-parked. Three in the morning. In the ghastly neon light a few familiar ghosts were wandering. Blacks in over-ample clothes. Prostitutes with long dreadlocks. Druggies, bums, drunks. All of them were a part of his previous existence, on the beat. That world which Niémans had had to leave for a well-paid, respectable desk job. For any other cop, a post in a central office was a promotion. For him, it was being put out to grass – plush grass, admittedly, but the move had still mortified him. He took another look at the night hawks that surrounded him. These creatures had been the trees of his personal woodland, where he once roamed, in the skin of a hunter.
Niémans drove without stopping, headlights full on, ignoring speed traps and limits. At eight a.m., he took the Grenoble exit on the autoroute. He crossed Saint-Martin-d'Hères, Saint-Martin-d'Uriage and headed toward Guernon, at the foot of the Grand Pic de Belledonne. All along the winding road forests of conifers alternated with industrial zones. A slightly morbid atmosphere hung in the air, as always in the countryside when the beauty of the scenery is insufficient to hide its profound loneliness.
The superintendent drove past the first road signs indicating the university. In the distance, the mountain peaks rose up in the misty light of a stormy morning. Coming out of a bend, he glimpsed the university at the bottom of the valley: its large modern buildings, its fluted blocks of concrete, all ringed off by long lawns. It made Niémans think of a sanatorium the size of a town hall.
He turned off the main road and drove down into the valley. To the west, he could see vertical streams running into each other, their silvery current beating against the dark sides of the mountains. He slowed down, and shuddered at the sight of that icy water, plummeting down, obscured by clumps of brushwood, then reappearing again, white and dazzling, before vanishing once more…
Niémans decided to take a short detour. He forked off, drove under a vaulted ceiling of larches and firs, moist from the morning dew, then came across a long plain bordered by lofty black cliffs.
The officer stopped. He got out of his car and grabbed his binoculars. He took a long look at the scenery. The river had disappeared. Then he realised that when the torrent reached the bottom of the valley it ran on behind the rock face. Gaps in the rock even gave him occasional glimpses of it.
Suddenly he noticed another detail and focused his binoculars on it. No, his eyes had not deceived him. He went back to his car and shot off toward the ravine. In one of the faults in the rock face he had just spotted a fluorescent yellow cordon, of the type used by the gendarmerie: