"You shouldn't have come back, Karim."
He did not need to turn round to know who had spoken. He clenched his fists and lowered his head until it was resting on the bones, then murmured:
"Crozier, don't tell me you're involved in this business…" The voice answered:
"I should never have let you loose on this case."
Karim glanced rapidly at the doorway of the vault. Henri Crozier's figure was clearly outlined. He was holding an MR73 model. Manhurin – the same gun as Niémans used. Six bullets in the cylinder. Fast-loading magazines in his pocket. A few seconds to empty it, then reload it, without any risk of it jamming. A precision piece. The lieutenant asked:
"What the fucking hell's your role in all this?"
The man did not reply. Lifting up his soaked elbows, Karim tried again:
"Can I at least get out of this shit-hole?"
Crozier gestured briefly with his gun.
"Come toward me. Only slowly. Nice and slowly."
Letting go of the desecrated coffin, Karim slipped through the water and headed for the steps. His torch, which he had put back between his teeth, flickered up crazily at the stone ceiling. Whirling flashes, like stabs of lightning.
The lieutenant reached the staircase and heaved himself up it. As he ascended, Crozier pulled back, keeping his gun on him. The rain was beating down in gusts. Soaked to the skin, the Arab got to his feet and faced the superintendent. He asked again:
"What's your part in all this? What do you know?"
Crozier replied at last:
"It was in 1980. I spotted her as soon as she arrived. This is my town. And it's small. My patch. What's more, I was practically the only cop in Sarzac at the time. That woman who'd come to work as a primary school teacher, she was too beautiful, too powerful…I immediately sensed there was something wrong about her."
The Arab whispered:
"Crozier, the Guardian of Sarzac"
"Yeah. So I looked into things. I found out that she had a child with her…And I got her to confide in me. She told me everything. She said that the demons wanted to kill her child."
"I know all that already."
"What you don't know is that I decided to protect that family. I had false papers made for them, I…"
Karim felt as if he was on the edge of a precipice.
"Who were these demons?"
"One day, two men came to town. They said they were collecting old school books. They'd come from Guernon, the same town as Fabienne. So I guessed at once that they were the demons…"
"What were their names?"
"Caillois and Sertys."
"Don't fuck me about. At that time, Rémy Caillois and Philippe Sertys were only about ten years old!"
"Those weren't their names. They were called Etienne Caillois and René Sertys. They must have been about forty. With bony faces, and wild staring eyes like fanatics."
A taste of acid rose up into Karim's throat. Why had he not thought of that? The "crime" of the blood-red rivers went back several generations. Before Rémy Caillois there had been Etienne Caillois; before Philippe Sertys, René Sertys. He murmured:
"And then?"
"I acted the inquisitorial cop. ID check, the works. But they were clean. As straight as dies. Still, they left again without having been able to identify Fabienne and her child. At least, that's what I thought. But, as soon as she heard that they'd been nosing around Sarzac, Fabienne wanted to beat it. So, I didn't ask her any questions. We just destroyed all the records, tore pages out of registers, wiped out every trace…Fabienne had changed her child's identity, but…"
Karim interrupted him. A curtain of rain lay between the two men.
"Young Sertys came back here on Sunday night. Do you have any idea what he was looking for in this vault?"
"No."
Abdouf pointed back at the tomb.
"That flicking coffin's full of rats' bones. It's a goddam nightmare. What does it all mean?"
"I don't know. You shouldn't have opened that coffin. You should respect the dead…"
"Who? Where's Judith Hérault's body? Is she really dead?"
"Dead and buried, my boy. I was the one who arranged her funeral."
The Arab shivered.
"And you tend the grave?"
"Yes, at night."
Walking up to the barrel of the gun, Karim suddenly roared: "Where is she? Where is Fabienne Hérault now?"
"You mustn't harm her."
"Superintendent, this case goes far deeper than a simple profanation of a cemetery. There have been murders."
"I know."
"You know?"
"It was all over the TV. On the late night news."
"So you know that there's a series of murders, the bodies mutilated and set in macabre positions, the works!…Crozier, tell me where I can find Fabienne Hérault!"
In the darkness, Crozier's face was knotted with tension. His gun was still pressing against the Arab's torso.
"You mustn't harm her."
"No one's going to harm her, Crozier. But now Fabienne Hérault's the only person who can shed a bit of light on this chaos! Everything points to her daughter, right? Everything points to Judith Hérault, who should be there in that tomb!"
A few seconds more under that overpowering deluge then, slowly, Crozier lowered his gun. The Arab knew that if he was going to solve a case once in his life, then this was the one. Finally, the superintendent said:
"Fabienne lives about twelve miles from here, on the Herzine hill. I'm coming with you. If you harm her, I'll kill you."
Karim smiled and pulled back. Then he swung round and kicked the superintendent full in the throat. Crozier was thrown back against the marble monument.
The Arab leant down over the unconscious old man. He did up his hood and pulled him under the shelter of a granite tombstone. Then he silently apologised.
But what he needed right now was a free hand.
CHAPTER 52
"It's hot stuff, Abdouf. Very hot stuff."
Patrick Astier's voice broke through a whirlwind of interferences. The cell phone had rung while Karim had been driving across a veritable steppe of gray rock. The cop had leapt out of his skin and narrowly avoided skidding off the road. Astier went on enthusiastically:
"Your two missions were time bombs waiting to go off. And they both blew up on me"
Karim felt his nerves harden into steel beneath his skin.
"Go on," he declared, pulling onto the side of the road and switching off his headlights.
"Firstly, Sylvain Hérault's accident. I found the police records. And got confirmation of what you'd been told. Sylvain Hérault was killed on his bicycle, on the D17, by an unidentified car. A shifty case. And left unsolved. At the time, the gendarmerie conducted a routine enquiry. No witnesses. No motive that could have suggested another explanation…"
His intonation indicated that he was waiting for a question. So Karim dutifully asked it:
"But?"
"But," the chemist went on, "Since that distant period, we have made giant strides in the treatment of photographs."
Karim sensed that another science lecture was about to start. He butted in:
"Please, Astier, just get to the point, will you?"
"OK. So I found some photos in the file. Black-and-white prints taken by a local hack. In them, you can make out the tyre-tracks of the bike, mixed in with the traces left by the car. They're all so small and out of focus that you wonder why they bothered to keep them."
"And?"
The scientist paused, for dramatic effect.
"And, Grenoble University boasts a state-of-the-art optical laboratory."
"For fuck's sake, Astier, get on with it!"
"Hang on a sec. Those guys can do things to a photograph that you would just not believe! They make a digital analysis, blow it up, contrast it, get rid of any imperfections, change the angles…to cut a long story short, they can dig out things that are invisible to the naked eye. They're good friends of mine. So I thought it might be a good idea to wake them up and get them onto the case. I used the fingerprint analyser as a scanner and sent them the photos. Even when woken up in the middle of the night, those guys are still absolute geniuses. They treated the film straight away and…"