JEAN-CHRISTOPHE 22 страница

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..."

Karim had to admit that he, too, had fallen into the same trap fourteen years later. His opinion of himself as a brilliant cop suddenly collapsed. If he had been able to retrace Fabienne and Judith's trail in a few hours, then it was simply because he had been following the signposts which had been left. The same signs that had fooled old Caillois and Sertys in 1982.

As though reading his mind, Judith went on:

"Maman tricked the lot of you! She's never been a religious maniac...She never believed in demons...She never wanted to exorcise my face...If she chose a nun to get the photos back, then it was to make the whole thing memorable, you see? She was pretending to wipe out our trail, while in fact she was digging out a deep open track so that the killers would follow us until the final scene...That's also why she confided in Crozier, who's about as subtle as a bull in a china shop."

Once again, Karim ran through the various clues, each of the details which had allowed him to trace the two women. The doctor consumed by remorse, the bribed photographer, the drunken priest, the nun, the fire-eater, the old man on the autoroute...All of them had been Fabienne Hérault's "signposts". The pointers which were to lead Caillois and Sertys to the faked accident. And which had, in a few hours, guided Karim to the autoroute service station and Judith's last moments.

Karim tried to disagree.

"Caillois and Sertys didn't follow your trail. No one mentioned them to me while I was looking for you"

"They were more subtle about it than you! But they certainly did follow us. We had a few dicey moments, believe me...

Because, when we stage-managed the accident, Caillois and Sertys were onto us and about to kill us."

"But the accident...How did you fake it?"

"It took Maman more than a month to prepare. Especially the way she smashed the car against the wall and got out unhurt."

"But...what about the body? Who was it?"

Judith sniggered. Karim thought of the blood-stained iron bars, the gasoline cans, the pools of blood. He was now sure that Fanny had merely abetted her sister in her schemes of vengeance, and that the real torturer had been Judith. A mad woman. Fit for the sanatorium. And obviously it was she who had tried to kill Niémans on the bridge.

"Maman used to read all the local newspapers on the look-out for accidents and obituaries...She went through the hospitals and cemeteries. What we needed was a body of about the same age and size as me. The week before the accident, she exhumed a child who'd been buried over a hundred miles away from where we lived. A little boy. Just perfect. Maman had already decided to declare me officially dead under the name `Jude, as the final touch of her ruse. And, anyway, she was going to completely crush the body. The child would no longer be recognisable. Not even its sex."

She giggled strangely, choking on her tears, then went on:

"There's something you have to know, Karim...From Friday to Sunday, we lived with that corpse in the house. A little boy who'd been killed in a motor-bike accident, and whose body was already in a terrible state. We kept it in a bathtub full of ice. Then we waited."

A question crossed Karim's mind:

"Did Crozier help you?"

"During the entire set-up. It was as if he was hypnotised by Maman's beauty. And he felt that this whole horrible business was only for our good. So we waited. For two days, in our little stone house. Maman kept on playing the piano. On and on she played.. That same Chopin sonata. As though she was trying to drown out that nightmare...As for me, that rotting body in the bathtub started to drive me crazy. The contact lenses were hurting my eyes. The notes of the sonata hammered into my brain like nails. My mind shattered, Karim...I was scared, so scared..."

"What about your fingerprints? How come your fingerprints were on the autoroute records?"

Judith, her curls flashing, smiled through her tears.

"That was child's play. Crozier took my fingerprints on a fresh card and swapped it over with the one kept in the service station. Maman didn't want to leave anything to chance, just in case the demons came back to check that it was really me."

Karim clenched his fists. It really had been child's play. He reproached himself for not having thought of that.

Suddenly, an image flashed into his mind. That bandaged hand, holding his Glock in the rain.

"So, that night, it was you?"

"Yes, sphinx eyes," she laughed. "I'd come to sacrifice Sophie Caillois, that little whore, who was so in love with her husband that she never dared tell on Rémy and the rest...I should have killed you..." Tears spilled out from her eyelids. "If I had done, then Fanny would still be alive. But I couldn't...I just couldn't."

Judith paused, her eyes blinking beneath her cyclist's helmet. Then she started speaking again in a rushed whisper:

"Immediately after the accident, I went to join Fanny in Guernon. She had asked her parents if she could live as a boarder on the top floor of Lamartine School...We were only eleven, but we managed to live as one immediately...I lived in the attic...I was already an excellent climber. I went down to see my sister over the joists and through the window...A real little spider girl...And nobody ever noticed me...

"The years went by...We took turns to be present in different situations, with the family, at school, with friends, with boys. We shared the same food, we swapped days. We lived exactly the same life, but one after the other. Fanny was the bright one, so she taught me everything about books, science and geology. And I taught her to climb mountains and navigate streams. The two of us made one incredible being...A sort of two-headed dragon.

"Sometimes, Maman would come and see us in the mountains and bring us some provisions. She never spoke to us about our origins, or those two years spent in Sarzac. She thought that this ruse was the only way for us to be happy...But I hadn't forgotten the past. I always carried with me a piano wire. And I continued to listen to the sonata in B flat. The sonata of the little corpse in the bathtub...Sometimes I flew into terrible rages...Just by gripping that piano wire, I cut deep weals into my fingers. Then everything came back to me. How frightened I had been in Sarzac, when pretending to be a little boy, those Sundays, near Sète, when I'd learnt to swallow fire, and that last evening, when I was waiting for Maman to leave with the little boy's body.

"Maman never agreed to tell me who the killers were, those bastards who'd pursued us and run over my father. I scared her, yes, I scared even her. I think she realised that, sooner or later, I was going to kill those murderers...My vengeance was awaiting a little spark...All I now regret is that those birth papers came to light so late, after old Sertys and Caillois were already dead."

Judith stopped speaking and took a firmer hold of the gun. Karim remained silent; and his silence was an interrogation in itself. Suddenly, the young woman started to yell:

"What else do you expect me to tell you? That Caillois admitted the whole thing and begged for our forgiveness? That this crazy business had been going on for generations? That they were continuing to swap over babies? That they were planning to marry us off, Fanny and me, to one of those decadent university runts? We were their creation, Karim..."

Judith leant forward.

"They were nuts...Total madmen who thought they were working for the good of humanity by creating perfect genetic mixes...Caillois reckoned he was God, with his people under him...As for Sertys, he raised rats by the thousand in his warehouse...The rats stood for the population of Guernon..

Each of them was named after one of the families, doesn't that remind you of anything? Do you realise just how warped those bastards were? And Chernecé rounded off the picture...He said that the irises of the superior race shone in a particular way, and that he would be a real fly on the wall, at the threshold of the world, brandishing his eye-shaped torches in the face of humanity..."

Judith knelt down on one knee, the Glock still aimed at Karim, and lowered her voice:

"Fanny and I really put the shits up them, believe me...The first day, we started off by sacrificing young Caillois. And our vengeance had to be at the same level as their conspiracy...The biological mutilations were Fanny's idea...She reckoned that we had to annihilate them totally, just as they had destroyed the identities of the children of Guernon...She also said that we ought to smash their bodies into a set of different reflections, like the shards of a broken mirror...I was the one who thought of the locations: water, ice and glass. And I was the one who did the dirty work...Who made the first of the flickers talk, with iron bars, fire and carpet cutters...

"Then we stuck his body up in the rock and went to smash up Sertys's warehouse...After that, we engraved a message into the librarian's wall...And signed it Judith, to scare the bastards really shitless, to show them that the ghost had risen from the grave...Fanny and I knew that the others in the plot would then rush back to Sarzac to check what they thought they had known since 1982 — that I was dead and buried in that lousy little tip...So we got there first and emptied my tomb...Then we filled it up with the rats' bones we'd found in the warehouse — Sertys used to label them, just like a real fucking nasty fetishist..."

Judith burst out laughing, then yelled once more:

"Just imagine their faces when they opened the coffin!" She then became serious again at once. "They just had to be taught a lesson, Karim...We just had to make them understand that the time for revenge had arrived...That they were going to die horribly...That they were going to pay for the harm they'd done to our town, our family, us, the two little sisters, and to me, me, me..."

Her voice grew softer. The daylight was glinting like mother-of-pearl.

Karim murmured:

"And what now? What are you going to do?"

"Go back to Maman."

The cop pictured that huge woman, surrounded by her sheets and brightly colored rags. He thought of Crozier, the loner, who must have gone to join her later the previous night. The two of them would be locked up, sooner or later.

"I'm going to have to arrest you, Judith."

The young woman sniggered.

"Arrest me? But I'm the one who's holding the gun, little sphinx! One move, and I'll kill you"

Forcing himself to smile, Karim approached her.

"It's all over now, Judith. We're going to take care of you, we'll..."

When she pressed the trigger, he had already drawn the Beretta he always carried strapped to his back, the Beretta which had allowed him to overcome the skinheads, his last card.

They fired their bullets and two gunshots rang out in the dawn. Karim was unscathed, but Judith fell back gracefully. As though borne away by the rhythm of a dance, she wobbled for a few seconds, her throat rapidly reddening with blood.

The young woman dropped the automatic, staggered slightly, then flopped down into the void. It seemed to Karim that a smile flickered across her face.

He suddenly screamed and leapt up over the rocks to look for Judith's body, the little girl whom he had loved — he knew that now — more than anything else in the world for the past twenty-four hours.

He spotted the bloody form as it floated off toward the river. He watched it draw away to rejoin the bodies of Fanny Ferreira and Pierre Niémans. In the distance, a brilliant dawn was rising, searing through the darkness of the mountains.

Karim took no notice.

He wondered how much sunlight would be needed to chase away the shadows that were folding around his heart.

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE

GRANGÉ

Was born in Paris 1961. Now an independent international reporter, he worked with magazines all over the world, as well as with various press agencies, before setting up his own news agency. Blood-Red Rivers, his second novel, became a huge bestseller in France and has since made into a film, The Crimson Rivers, directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Jean Reno and Vincent Calles.

Also by Jean-Christohe Grangé

The Stone Council

Blood-Red Rivers

Flight of the Storks

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