Russell looked at her. A film of sadness passed over his eyes, the same sadness Vivien had caught in them a few days earlier.
‘I’ve been waiting more than ten years. I can wait a little while longer.’
He turned his back on her and left. Standing at the top of the stairs for a few moments, feeling slightly perplexed by him, Vivien watched him descend and disappear on the floor below. Then she descended the stairs in her turn and went back to her desk. Along with her excitement at the importance of the task that had fallen into her hands, the impact of the words she had read in that letter had not gone away. Crazy words carried on the wind like poisonous seeds, which had somehow found the right soil in which to grow. Vivien wondered what kind of suffering the man who had left that message had endured and what kind of sickness afflicted the man who had received it, if he had decided to accept his inheritance and carry out his father’s posthumous revenge.
The limits of what’s crazy have grown wider …
Maybe in a case like this, it would have been more correct to say that the limits had been completely abolished.
She sat down at her desk and connected to the police database. She typed in the words ‘the only flag’ and waited for the results. Almost immediately, a photograph of a man’s bare back appeared on the screen, bearing a tattoo exactly like the one found on the dead body. It was the emblem of a group of bikers based in Coney Island who called themselves the Skullbusters. There were other photographs: members of the group who had been in trouble with the law. Next to the name of each one, their offences were listed, large and small. The photographs seemed quite old and Vivien wondered if any of them was the person who had rested for years in the foundations of a building on 23rd Street. It would be the greatest of ironies. But she wouldn’t have been too surprised. As the captain had pointed out earlier, their work relied a lot on coincidence. The fact that photographs of the same young man and the same cat had been found in two places so distant in time and space was tangible proof of that.
As she was noting down the address of the bikers’ meeting place, the file on the Ziggy Stardust case arrived by email from the 67th precinct. Bellew had wasted no time. Vivien now had all the available material on her computer: the ME’s initial findings, the report drawn up by the detective in charge of the case, and the photographs taken at the scene of the crime. She zoomed all the way in on one photograph taken from the angle that interested her. There, clearly visible, was a red mark on one of the buttons of the printer, a red mark, as if someone had pressed the button with a bloodstained finger. Something else to support Russell Wade’s story.
The other photographs showed the body of a slightly built man lying on the floor covered in blood. Vivien looked at them for a long time without feeling the slightest pity: the bastard had got what he deserved. For what he had done to her niece and God knew how many other kids. Not for the first time, she was forced to realize how much personal involvement changed your perspective on things.
Vivien took the remote control from her pocket and opened the car doors automatically. By the time Vivien got in, Russell Wade was busy putting on his seatbelt. As she observed him, she caught herself thinking that he was a handsome man. She immediately called herself a fool. None of this was putting her in a good mood.
He looked at her expectantly. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Coney Island.’
‘To do what?’
‘See people.’
‘What people?’
‘Wait and see.’
As the car slipped into the flow of traffic, Russell sat back in his seat and stared at the street in front of him. ‘Are you in some kind of state of grace today,’ he asked, ‘or are you always this talkative?’
‘Only with important guests.’
Russell Wade turned to her. ‘You don’t like me, do you?’
The words sounded more like a statement of fact than a genuine question. Vivien was pleased with such a direct approach. For the sake of their present and future relations, she expressed her opinion without beating about the bush.
‘In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t give a damn about you. People can do whatever they like with their own lives. Even throw them away, as long as they don’t harm anybody. There are a lot of people around who need help because they’ve got into trouble through no fault of their own. Anyone who’s adult and conscious and goes looking for trouble, as far as I’m concerned, can look after themselves. That isn’t apathy, it’s common sense.’
Russell Wade nodded eloquently. ‘OK. At least we know where we stand.’
Vivien swerved and pulled up at the kerb, provoking a reaction from the motorists behind her. She let go of the wheel and turned to Russell.
‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘You may have charmed the captain with that story about your redemption, but I’m not such a pushover.’
Russell sat looking at her in silence. His dark, apparently defenceless eyes made her think she was being made fun of. When she next spoke, it was with a harshness that was uncharacteristic of her.
‘People don’t change, Wade. We are what we are, and we all have our own place. However much we stray, we always come back to it in the end. And I don’t think you’re any exception.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You came to the precinct with a photocopy in your pocket of the sheet of paper Ziggy gave you. That means you still have the original, the one that’s stained with his blood. And in case we didn’t believe you and threw you out, you’d have used it to show to the FBI or the NSA or whoever.’
Vivien continued the onslaught.
‘If for any reason we’d asked you to empty your pockets we’d have found only the photocopy of a page you could have passed off as something you’d dreamed up. Passing off one thing for another seems like a speciality of yours.’
Her words did not seem to have fazed Russell. This was a sign either that he had amazing self-control or that he was used to it. In spite of her anger, Vivien leaned more towards the second of these hypotheses.
She grabbed the wheel, pulled away from the kerb, and resumed her journey to Coney Island. Russell’s next question took her by surprise. Maybe he, too, was trying to form an opinion of his travelling companion.
‘Detectives usually have partners. How come you don’t have one?’
‘Right now, I have you. And your being here reminds me why I usually work alone.’
After that curt reply, silence fell in the car. During the conversation, Vivien had driven the car downtown and was now crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. When they had left Manhattan behind them, Vivien tuned the radio to Kiss 98.7, a black music station. She drove the Volvo along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and then onto Gowanus.