"It's here. I'm sure it's here."
Karim peered around again, then focused on the pipes of the central heating system. He walked alongside them, listening to the constant pumping of the boiler. He straddled a set of dumbbells and punch balls and managed to reach a grille of greasy metal bars, which was positioned plumb with the foam matting covering the walls. Without bothering about making a noise, he pulled away the grille and tore down the foam. This barrier concealed the doorway to the boiler room.
He fired one bullet into the notched opening of the lock. With an explosion of shards and metal splinters, the door blew off its hinges. He finished off the job by crushing the panel down with his heel.
Inside, everything was dark.
He stuck his head through, then immediately pulled it back. He was ghastly white. The two men dived in together.
A pungent stench gripped their nostrils.
Blood.
Blood on the walls, on the cast-iron pipes, on the rings of bronze lying on the floor. Blood on the ground, mopped up by handfuls of talcum powder, lying in stagnant, lumpy pools. Blood on the bulging sides of the boiler.
The two men had no desire to be sick, it was as if their minds were detached from their bodies, suspended in terrified astonishment. They went further inside, flashing their torches around them. Piano wires glistened, twisted about the piping. Jerry-cans of gasoline lay on the ground, corked with stoppers of blood-stained cloth. The bars of the dumb-bells were stuck with scraps of dry flesh and dark blood clots. Rusty carpet cutters had been abandoned in puddles of solidified gore.
As they ventured further and further inside, the wobbling beams from their torches showed up the panic that was gripping their limbs. Niémans spotted some colored objects on a bench. He knelt down. Iceboxes. He pulled one of them over to him and opened it. Without saying a word, he shone his spotlight into it for Karim's benefit.
Eyes.
Pale and bulbous, glittering with dewy brightness on a bed of ice.
Niémans was already opening another icebox. This one contained the blue forms of frozen hands. Their nails were darkened with blood, their wrists marked with incisions. The superintendent drew back. Karim took him by the shoulders and groaned.
They both now realised that they were no longer in a mere boiler room. They had entered inside the murderer's mind. Within her secret lair, where she had decided to slay the baby-killers.
Karim's voice rang out, piercingly:
"She's long gone. Nowhere near Guernon."
"No," Niémans replied, getting to his feet. "She wants Sophie Caillois. The last name on her list. They've just brought Sophie into the station. And I'm sure she'll find out – or knows already – and is going to go looking for her."
"With all those road-blocks? She won't be able to make a single move without being spotted and…"
Karim fell silent. The two men looked at each other, their faces lit up by the rising beams of their torches. With one voice, they murmured:
"The river."
The obvious place was on the edge of the campus. There, where Caillois's body had been discovered. There, where the current fell away into a small lake, before resuming its course once more toward the town.
The two policemen drove down to this limit, skidding over the grass slopes, taking the one that led down to the river bank. Suddenly, as Karim was braking alongside the stone parapet, in the light of their headlamps they saw a figure dressed in a black, glimmering oilskin, and wearing a small rucksack. A face turned round and froze in the blinding beam of light. Karim recognised the helmet and the balaclava. The young woman was untying a long red inflatable dinghy, and pulling it toward her with the rope, as though mastering a frisky horse.
Niémans muttered:
"Don't shoot. And keep your distance. I'm arresting her on my own."
Before Karim had time to reply, the superintendent had leapt out of the car and dashed down the last few feet of the slope. The lieutenant brought the car to a standstill, turned off the engine and watched. In the ray of the headlights, he saw the superintendent running toward her and yelling:
"Fanny!"
The young woman was getting into the raft. Niémans grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back toward him. Karim sat there frozen, as though hypnotised by the strange ballet those two figures were performing. He saw them embrace – at least that was what it looked like. He saw the woman throw her head back, then bridle up in a savage movement. He saw Niémans stiffen, arch over, then draw his gun. Blood was spurting from his lips and Karim realised that she had just ripped his guts out with a stab from a carpet cutter. He heard the muffled sound of the shots, Niémans's MR73 finishing off its prey, while the two figures were still gripped together in a kiss of death.
"No!"
Karim's scream died in his throat. Gun in hand, he ran toward the couple who were now swaying by the edge of the lake. He tried to shout again. He wanted to run faster, to run back through time. But he was too late to stop the inevitable. Pierre Niémans and the woman tumbled down with a ghastly splash.
When he reached the bank, it was only to see the two bodies being carried away by the gentle current toward the outlet. The interlocked corpses floated gracefully and sweetly on past the rocks before vanishing into the river which ran down to the town.
The young cop remained motionless, staring fixedly at the current, listening to the rushing of the foam, which murmured on behind the rocks beyond the edge of the lake. But then, suddenly, as though in a never-ending nightmare, he felt the blade of the carpet cutter dig into his throat, piercing his flesh.
A swift hand passed under his arm and made off with his Glock, which he had put back into his holster.
"Nice to see you again, Karim."
The voice was soft. As soft as a ring of pebbles placed on top of a tombstone. Slowly, Karim turned round. In the gloomy light, he immediately recognised that oval face, that dark complexion, those bright eyes, misted over with tears.
He knew that he was standing in front of Judith Hérault, the doppelganger of the woman Niémans had called "Fanny". The little girl he had been looking for so long.
The little girl who had grown into a woman.
And who was very much alive.
CHAPTER 60
"There were two of us, Karim. There were always two of us"
It took the lieutenant a moment before he was able to pronounce a word. He finally murmured:
"Tell me, Judith. Tell me everything. If I have to die, I want to know the truth first."
Her hands clenched round the Glock, the young woman was still crying. She was wearing a black oil-skin, diver's leggings and a dark close-fitting fiber-glass helmet, which sat like a hand poised over her head of wild curly hair.
She suddenly started to speak:
"In Sarzac, when Maman realised that the demons were after us, she also worked out that we'd never be free of them…That the demons would always be on our trail, and that they'd end up killing me…And so she had a brilliant idea…She reckoned that the only place they'd never come looking for me would be in the shadow of my twin sister, Fanny Ferreira…In the very heart of her life…She reckoned that the two of us, my twin and me, should live one single life together, unbeknown to everyone else."
"And the other parents…Did they play along?"
Judith laughed fleetingly, between her sobs.
"No, you idiot…Fanny and I had got to know each other at Lamartine School…And we didn't want to be separated…So my sister agreed to the idea at once…That we'd both live one life as two people, in the greatest possible secrecy. But the first thing to do was to get rid of the killers, once and for all. We had to make them believe I was dead. Maman arranged the whole thing to make it look as though we were running away from Sarzac…Whereas, in fact, she was leading them toward our trap – that car accident…"