As he came out of a bend, Niémans could see the Jasse suspension bridge: three and a half miles of concrete, balanced on steel towers that were over three hundred feet tall. This meant that he was now only six miles away from Guernon, and safety.
He accelerated once more.
He was starting to cross the bridge when a white light blinded him, suddenly engulfing his rear windscreen. Headlamps full on, the Range Rover was back against his bumper. Niémans lowered his gaze from the dazzling rear-view mirror and stared at the concrete strip, hanging in the darkness. He said to himself: "I can't die. Not like this." Then he slammed his foot down once more.
The headlamps were still behind him. Bent over his steering wheel, he kept his eyes on the safety railings, which glimmered in his own lights, surrounding the road in a sort of fiery embrace, a glittering halo, steaming as the rain poured down.
Yards snatched from time.
Seconds stolen from the earth.
A strange idea crossed Niémans's mind, a sort of inexplicable conviction: while he was still driving on this bridge, still heading through this storm, nothing could happen to him. He was alive. He was light. He was invulnerable.
The collision took his breath away.
His head snapped forward into the windscreen. The rear-view mirror smashed into pieces. Its composite support ripped into Niémans's forehead like a hook. He groaned and rolled up, hands locked together over his head. He felt his car pulling over to the left, then to the right, wobbling on its axis…Blood poured down half of his face.
Another jolt, then suddenly the icy slap of the rain. The cold reaches of the night.
There was silence. Darkness. Seconds.
When Niémans next opened his eyes, he could not believe what he was seeing: the sky and the stars, upside down. He was alone, flying through the wind and the rain.
His car had hit the parapet, throwing him out, off the bridge, into the void. He was diving down, slowly, silently, aimlessly beating his arms and his legs, wondering absurdly what death was going to feel like.
A varied succession of pain was the answer. The whipping of pine needles. Branches cracking. His flesh torn apart into a thousand shards of agony, through forests of spruce and larch.
There were two almost simultaneous shocks.
Firstly, he hit the ground, his fall broken by the countless boughs of the trees. Then an apocalyptic crash. An ear-splitting din. As though a massive lid had just been brought down onto his body. The moment exploded into a riot of contradictory sensations. Biting cold. Scalding steam. Water. Rock. Darkness.
Time passed. An eclipse.
Niémans opened his eyes again. In front of his eyelids, a second set welcomed him – the blackness of the forest. Little by little, like a glimmer of the living dead, light returned. His numbed brain slowly formed the following conclusion: he was alive, still alive.
He had fallen down between the trees and, by pure chance, landed in a water drainage channel at the foot of one of the supporting pylons. Following exactly the same trajectory, his car had flown off the bridge and, like a huge army tank, had crashed down on top of him. But without touching him. The broad chassis of the saloon had been stopped by the banks of the drainage canal.
A miracle.
Niémans closed his eyes. Multiple wounds tortured his body, then a stronger, burning sensation – like a lance of fire – beat into his right temple. The superintendent guessed that the strut of the rear-view mirror had gouged its way into his flesh, just above his ear. On the other hand, he felt as if the rest of him had escaped relatively unscathed.
His chin stuck down on his chest, he stared up at the steaming wreck of his car. He was imprisoned beneath a roof of red-hot metal, in a concrete coffin. He turned his head to the right, then to the left and noticed that a section of one of the bumpers was pinning him down into the canal.
In desperation, he made a violent lateral movement. The various pains that were prickling across his body now turned out to be an advantage: they canceled one another out, leaving his flesh in a kind of agonised indifference.
He managed to slide beneath the bumper and extricate himself from his death bed. Once his arms were free, his hand instinctively shot to his temple and felt a thick flow of blood oozing out from the torn flesh. He groaned as he felt it stream slowly between his aching fingers. It made him think of the beak of an oily bird, spewing out gasoline. Tears came to his eyes. He straightened up, leaning one arm on the edge of the canal, then rolling over onto the ground. Meanwhile, another thought crossed his addled brain.
The killer was coming back. To finish him off.
Grabbing hold of the bodywork, he managed to get to his feet.
He punched at the dented boot; it flew open, allowing him to retrieve his pump-action shotgun, as well as a handful of cartridges which had spilled out inside. He stuck the weapon under his left arm – his left hand was still clamped on his wound – and succeeded in loading it with his right hand. The process was carried out by touch. He could scarcely see a thing. His glasses were broken and the night was still pitch black.
His face splattered with blood and dirt, his body wracked with pain, the superintendent turned round, sweeping all before him with his gun. Not a sound. Not a movement. His head went dizzy. He slid down the side of his car and fell once more into the drainage canal. This time, he felt the chill of its waters and woke up. He was now bouncing against the concrete edges as they funneled him down toward the river.
Why not, after all?
He clutched his gun against his body and let himself float on the rainwater, like a pharaoh on his way down the river of the dead.
CHAPTER 49
Niémans floated for a long time. His eyes open, he could see the dark mass of the starless sky through the gaps in the trees. To his right and to his left, he made out landslides of red clay, heaps of branches and leaves, forming an inextricable mangrove swamp.
Soon, the stream swelled, becoming stronger and louder. Head back, he let himself be borne away. The icy water caused a vasoconstriction in his temple, thus preventing him from losing too much blood. As he drifted onwards, he began to hope that the course of the water would take him back to Guernon and the university.
Before long, he realised that his hopes were groundless. The stream was a dead end; it did not flow down in the direction of the campus. It meandered round in increasingly tight bends within the forest, once more losing its strength and speed.
The current stopped.
Niémans swam to the bank and, gasping for breath, pulled himself out of the water. The stream was so full of debris and loaded down with mud, that it gave off no reflection at all. He slumped down onto the damp earth, carpeted with dead leaves. His nostrils filled with the scent of mould, that characteristic, slightly smoky smell of the soil, mingled with fibers and shoots, humus and insects.
He rolled onto his back and glanced up at the boughs of the forest. The wood was not twisted and overgrown, but instead formed a spacious airy grove, in which reigned an atmosphere of vegetative freedom. It was so dark, however, that he could not even see the black forms of the mountains that towered above him. And he did not know how long he had been drifting, nor in which direction.
Despite the pain and the cold, he dragged himself over to a tree and leant against its trunk. Forcing himself to think, he tried to picture in his mind the map of the region on which he had marked the important places in the case. He remembered in particular that the University of Guernon lay to the north of Les Sept-Laux.
The north.
Since he had no idea where he was, how could he find the north? He had no compass, nor other magnetic device. During the day he could have used the sun as a guide, but during the night?