They entered the apartment as if entering a temple of evil, holding their breaths. For years a man had lived within these walls.
Now that they had reached a point where they had an inkling of his story, they knew the true extent of the resentment that, day after day, had nourished his madness.
He had chosen to kill people under the illusion that in doing so he was destroying his own memories.
They took a quick look around the bare room, which was devoid of any object that was not strictly utilitarian. No paintings, no ornaments, no concessions to personal taste, unless that very absence could be considered a kind of personal taste. Next to the refrigerator was the only trace of normal life and humanity in the room. A shelf filled with aromatic essences, a sign that the man who had lived here had cooked for himself.
They concluded their visit of the tiny apartment in the adjoining room. Against the wall to the right of the door was a closet, and opposite it was a single bed pushed almost up against the wall. To the right of the bed, dividing it from the wall, a night table and a grim-looking lamp. To the left was a rack with two parallel shelves. The upper shelf was the height of a normal table, the lower one some twenty inches from the floor. In this room was only the second chair in the whole apartment, an old office armchair on wheels, which looked so shabby it might have been acquired from a junkyard rather than bought. The walls were bare, apart from a large map of the city hanging on the wall above the rack.
There were some objects on the lower shelf. Mostly books. A few magazines. A pack of cards that made them think of endless games of solitaire. And a big grey cardboard folder containing sheets of paper.
Vivien went closer.
If this was where he prepared his devices, then any tools or other things that could be analysed would already have been taken away by the team that had searched the apartment the previous day. But the captain had assured them that everything had been left intact, which made it likely that they hadn’t found anything.
She bent down and looked at some of the books. A Bible. A cookery book. A thriller by Jeffery Deaver. A tourist guide to New York.
She picked up the folder and placed it on the upper shelf. When she opened it, she found it full of drawings. Oddly, none of them were on normal paper. They had all been executed on stiff sheets of transparent plastic, as if the artist had wanted to express his originality, not only through his talent but also through the medium he had used.
She started looking at the drawings, one by one.
It soon became clear that the medium was the only original thing about them, because, even to an untrained eye, the drawings revealed no artistic talent at all. The composition was approximate, the line wavering, and the use of colour lacked both taste and technique. The person who had lived in this apartment seemed to have been obsessed with constellations. Each drawing was of a different constellation, but according to a map of the stars unknown to anyone but the artist.
Constellation of Beauty, Constellation of Karen, Constellationof the End, Constellation of Wrath …
A series of points joined by different-coloured lines. Sometimes stars, drawn in a childlike hand, sometimes circles, sometimes crosses, sometimes just tangled brush strokes. Russell, who had held back until now, came closer to see what Vivien was looking at.
He allowed himself a judgement she couldn’t help but share. ‘Horrible, aren’t they?’
She was just about to agree when her cellphone started ringing. She put a hand in her pocket, planning to turn it off without even looking to see who was calling her. But then she took it out reluctantly and looked at it, afraid that she would see the number of the Mariposa clinic on the display.
Instead, it showed the name of Father McKean.
‘Hello.’
She heard his voice, familiar but oddly different. It sounded tense, almost frightened, without any trace of the energy it usually conveyed. ‘Vivien, it’s Michael.’
‘Hi. What is it?’
‘I need to see you, Vivien. As soon as possible, and alone.’
‘Michael, I’m tremendously busy right now, I can’t-’
‘It’s a matter of life and death, Vivien,’ he said as if he had rehearsed these words to himself many times. ‘Not mine but that of many people.’
A moment’s hesitation. A moment that, to judge by his next words, must have seemed endless to him. ‘It’s to do with those explosions, may God forgive me.’
‘The explosions? What’s your connection with the explosions?’
‘Come quickly, I beg you.’
Father McKean hung up. Vivien stood there in the middle of the room, in the square of sunlight cast on the floor from the window. She realized that while she had been on the telephone, as often happened when she was engrossed, she had moved, so that she was now back in the living room.
Russell had followed her and had stopped in the doorway to the bedroom.
She looked at him. She wasn’t sure what to say. Michael had asked to speak with her alone. Taking Russell with her might mean annoying Michael and perhaps inhibiting him from saying what he had to say. At the same time, it meant confessing that her niece was in a community for drug addicts, and that was something she couldn’t deal with right now.
She made a quick choice, putting off until later the question of whether she had chosen rightly or wrongly. ‘I have to go somewhere.’
‘Does that mean you have to go alone?
Russell knew something was up: during her phone conversation, he had heard her let slip the word explosions.
‘Yes. I have to see someone and I have to see him alone.’
‘I thought we had an agreement.’
She turned her back on him, and immediately felt ashamed of doing that. ‘The agreement doesn’t apply to this.’
‘The captain gave me his word I could follow the investigation.’
She felt anger rising inside her.
She turned abruptly, a hard expression on her face. ‘The captain gave you his word,’ she said curtly. ‘I didn’t.’
The following second lasted a century.
Ican’t believe I really said that…