Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  The doctor laughed sardonically.

  "Madness is a cunning beast, superintendent. It can hide itself from others, slip away under a harmless-looking exterior. You should know that even better than I do."

  "But you've just told me that you found him evidently insane?"

  "I'm experienced. And, since then, Caillois perhaps learnt to control himself."

  "Why did you note: `Therapy requested'?"

  "I advised him to go and get help. That's all."

  "And did you contact Guernon Hospital yourself?"

  "To be honest, I can't remember. His case was an interesting one, but I don't think I told the hospital about him. You know, if the sufferer doesn't…"

  "You said `interesting'?"

  The doctor breathed deeply.

  "He was living in an enclosed world of extreme strictness, in which his personality multiplied. Other people probably thought he was fairly laid back, but he was absolutely obsessed by order and precision. Each of his feelings crystallised into a concrete form, a separate personality. He was a one-man army. A fascinating case."

  "Was he dangerous?"

  "Definitely."

  "And you just let him go."

  There was a pause, then:

  "Oh, you know, the number of madmen on the loose…"

  "Doctor," Niémans went on in a hushed tone. "The man was married."

  "Really? Then I pity his wife."

  The policeman hung up. These revelations had opened new horizons. And deepened his anxiety.

  Niémans decided to pay another little call.

  "You lied to me!"

  Sophie Caillois tried to push the door shut, but the superintendent's elbow was wedged in the jamb.

  "Why didn't you tell me that your husband was sick?"

  "Sick?"

  "Schizophrenic. According to the specialists, he needed locking up."

  "You bastard."

  Her lips tight, the young woman tried once more to close the door, but Niémans had no difficulty staying where he was. Despite her lank hair, despite her unravelled pullover, he found that woman more beautiful than ever.

  "Don't you understand?" he yelled. "We're looking for a killer. We're looking for a motive. Maybe Rémy Caillois did something or other which might explain his horrible death. Something he might not even have been able to remember. Please…you're the only one who can help me!"

  Sophie Caillois opened her eyes wide. All the beauty of her face formed itself into subtle networks of lines and twitched nervously. Particularly her perfectly drawn eyebrows, which had frozen into a splendid, tragic expression.

  "You're crazy."

  "I have to know about his past…"

  "You're crazy."

  The woman was trembling. Niémans lowered his eyes despite himself. He took in the shape of her shoulder blades, rising up under the wool of the pullover. Through it, he could make out a twisted, almost shrivelled, bra strap. Suddenly, an impulse led him to grab her wrist and pull up her sleeve. Blue marks covered her forearm. Niémans cried:

  "He beat you!"

  The superintendent looked away from the dark traces and stared into Sophie Caillois's eyes.

  "He beat you! Your husband was sick. He liked hurting people. I'm sure of that. He'd done something wrong. I'm sure you have your suspicions. You haven't told me a tenth of what you know!"

  The woman spat in his face. Staggering, Niémans pulled back.

  She seized her chance and slammed the door. When Niémans's shoulder charged it once more, a sequence of bolts was clicking shut on the other side. In the corridor, the boarders were staring worriedly at him from their doors.

  The policeman kicked the jamb.

  "I'll be back!" he yelled.

  Silence had descended.

  Niémans punched the wood one last time, which gave off a hollow echo, then remained motionless for a few seconds.

  The woman's voice, quivering with sobs, came from the other side of the door, as though from a deep pit.

  "You're crazy."

  CHAPTER 14

  "I want a plain-clothes cop on her tail. Call the Grenoble crime squad."

  "Sophie Caillois? Why?"

  Niémans looked at Barnes. They were both in the main hall of the Guernon gendarmerie. The captain was wearing the standard royal blue sweater with its white lateral stripe. He looked like a sailor.

  "That woman's hiding something," Niémans explained. "But you surely don't think that it was her who…"

  "No, I don't. But she isn't telling us everything she knows."

  Unconvinced, Barnes nodded, then he handed the superintendent a large cardboard box crammed with faxes, documents and rustling carbon paper.

  "The first results of our general investigation," he declared. "For the moment, there's not much to write home about."

  Oblivious to the surrounding din of bustling gendarmes, Niémans glanced through the files as he strolled back to his office. He inspected the thick wads of carbon copies summing up Barnes's and Vermont's enquiries. Despite the large number of reports and statements, not a single piece of solid evidence had emerged. The procedures, interrogations, searches, fieldwork…had produced nothing. As he entered his glass-walled office, Niémans grumbled to himself. Such a spectacular crime, in such a small town. The superintendent just could not believe that they still had not come up with a serious lead.

  He grabbed a chair from behind his metal desk and started reading through it all thoroughly.

  The idea of a prowler had led to nothing. The enquiries in prisons, police stations and law courts had all been inconclusive. As for thefts of cars during the previous forty-eight hours, not a single one could be directly associated with the killing. The hunt for murders and other crimes that had occurred during the last twenty years had also drawn a blank. Nobody could remember any other killing which had been so atrocious and so strange, or any other act similar to it. In the town itself, police records contained only a few mountain rescues, petty thefts, accidents, fires etc.

  Niémans flicked through the next folder. The systematic questioning of all the hoteliers, via fax, had proved fruitless.

  He went on to Vermont's contribution. His men were continuing their search along the banks of the river. For the moment, they had visited only five refuges and there were seventeen of them, according to the map, some of which were perched up on the mountain at an altitude of over nine thousand feet. Did it make any sense to kill someone at such a height? His men had also questioned the nearby country folk. Some of these interviews had already been typed up in the familiar jargon of the gendarmerie. Niémans glanced through them and smiled: if the spelling mistakes and turns of phrase were similar to those of policemen, other expressions were redolent of the army. The men had asked questions in service stations, railway stations and at bus stops. Nothing doing. But rumors were now starting to run rife in the streets and chalets. Why all these questions? Why all these gendarmes?

  Niémans laid the file down on his desk. Through the window he saw a patrol that had just returned, their cheeks pink and their eyes glassy from the cold. He made a questioning gesture at Captain Vermont, who answered with a clear shake of his head. Nothing.

  For a few seconds, the superintendent watched the uniforms as they went past, but his thoughts were already elsewhere. He was thinking about the two women. One of them was as tough as tree-bark. Her muscles must be full, her skin dark and velvety. A taste of resin and rubbed herbs. The other was frail and bitter. She oozed uneasiness, an aggressiveness mixed with fear, which Niémans found equally fascinating. What was the strange beauty of that bony face hiding? Had Rémy Caillois really beaten her? And how much grief did she really feel at the sight of her mutilated husband, whose body had such suffering written all over it?

  Niémans got up and looked through one of the windows. Behind the clouds, above the mountains, the sun was shedding yellow beams, which resembled clear gashes dug out in the dark, swollen flesh of the storm. Below, the superintendent
gazed at Guernon's identical gray houses. The polygonal roofs to prevent the snow from piling up. The dark windows, small and square like paintings drowned in shadows. The river which crossed the town and ran alongside the detachment of gendarmes.

  The image of the two women filled his mind once again. In each enquiry, the same sensation gripped him. The investigations heightened his senses, giving him a feeling of a thrilling, vibrant courtship. He fell in love only when pursuing criminals: with witnesses, suspects, whores, barmaids…

  The brunette or the blonde?

  His cell phone rang. It was Antoine Rheims.

  "I've just come back from Hôtel-Dieu Hospital."

  Niémans had let the morning pass by without even calling Paris. That business at the Parc des Princes was now going to shoot back toward him like an explosive boomerang. The Chief continued:

  "The medics are attempting a fifth skin graft to save his face. Because of this, he now has practically no flesh left on his thighs. But that's not all. Three skull fractures. The loss of one eye. And seven facial fractures. Seven, Niémans. His lower jaw has been pushed back into his larynx. Shards of bone have severed his vocal cords. He's in a coma but, come what may, he'll never talk again. The medics say that even a car accident could not have caused so much damage. So what am I supposed to tell them now? And what about the British Embassy? And the media? The two of us have known each other for a long time. And I think we're friends. But I also think that you're a violent maniac."

  Niémans's hands started to tremble.

  "That hooligan was a murderer," he replied.

  "And what does that make you then?"

  The cop did not answer. He passed the phone, which was gleaming with sweat, into his left hand. Rheims went on:

  "How are your enquiries progressing?"

  "Slowly. No leads. No witnesses. It's going to be much harder than we first thought."

  "I told you so! When the press catches on that you're in Guernon, they're going to start buzzing about you like flies round shit. Why the hell did I send you there?"

  Rheims slammed the phone down. Niémans sat there for a few minutes, his eyes staring into nothingness, his mouth dry. In blinding flashes, his mind played back the violence of the previous night.

  His nerves had cracked. He had beaten that murderer in a fit of rage, which had drowned him, had totally wiped out any other idea than the desire to crush, there and then, what he was holding in his hands.

  Pierre Niémans had always lived in a world of violence, a universe of depravity, with cruel and savage borders, and he did not fear to walk where danger lurked. On the contrary, he had always sought it out, flattering it, the better to affront and control it. But he was no longer capable of keeping that control. That violence had now invaded him, had entered his very marrow. He was now weak and under its command. And he had not even managed to master his own fears. In some corner of his head, dogs were still howling.

  He suddenly jumped. His mobile was ringing again. It was Marc Costes, the forensic pathologist, his voice triumphant:

  "Some good news, superintendent. We have a solid piece of evidence. It's about the water we found under the eyelids. I've just received the laboratory report"

  "And?"

  "And it doesn't come from the river. Incredible, isn't it? I'm working on the problem with Patrick Astier, a chemist from the specialist branch in Grenoble. He's a real whiz. According to him, the traces of pollution in the water found in the eye-sockets are not at all the same as those found in the river."

  "Can you be more precise?"

  "The liquid under the eyelids contains H2SO4 and HNO3, that is to say, sulphuric acid and nitric acid. It has a pH of 3. In other words, it's highly acidic. Almost like vinegar. Such a figure is a precious piece of information."

  "I don't understand. What do you mean?"

  "I don't want to get technical with you, but sulphuric acid and nitric acid are derivatives of S02, sulphur dioxide, and NO2, nitrogen dioxide. According to Astier, only one sort of industry produces such a mixture of dioxides: power stations which burn lignite. That is to say, an extremely old form of power station. Astier's conclusion is that the victim was killed or transported near just such a place. Find a lignite burner in the region, and you'll have located the scene of the crime."

  Niémans stared up at the sky. Its dark scales were glittering in the persistent sunlight, like an immense silvery salmon. Maybe he was at last onto something. He ordered:

  "Fax me the composition of that water on Barnes's number.". The superintendent was opening his office door when Eric Joisneau appeared.

  "I've been looking for you everywhere. I think I've got some vital information."

  Was the investigation at last beginning to take off? The two officers retreated into the room and Niémans closed the door. Joisneau was feverishly grasping his notebook.

  "I've discovered that there's a home for young blind kids near Les Sept-Laux. A lot of them apparently come from Guernon. They suffer from a variety of complaints. Cataracts, pigmentary retinitis, color blindness. The number of cases in Guernon is way over the national average."

  "Go on. What's the reason for that?"

  Joisneau cupped his hands together.

  "The valley. The isolation. A medic explained that they are genetic problems. Handed down from one generation to the next, because of a certain amount of inbreeding. It's apparently quite common in isolated areas. A sort of genetic contamination."

  The lieutenant tore a page off his pad.

  "Look, here's the address of the home. The director, Doctor Champelaz, has made an in-depth study of the phenomenon. I thought that you'd…"

  Niémans pointed a finger at Joisneau.

  "You go"

  The young officer's face brightened.

  "You trust me?"

  "Yes, I trust you. Now, split."

  Joisneau spun round, then, knitting his brows, changed his mind.

  "Superintendent, I…Sorry, but why don't you want to question the director yourself? It could be an important lead. Are you onto something better? Or do you think I'll ask more pertinent questions because I'm a local boy? I don't get it."

  Niémans leant on the door jamb.

  "You're right. I am onto something. But I'll give you a little extra lesson, Joisneau. In an enquiry, external motivations also have a part to play."

  "What sort of motivations?"

  "Personal ones. I'm not going to that home, because I suffer from a phobia."

  "What? Of blind people?"

  "No. Of dogs."

  The lieutenant looked astonished.

  "I don't get it."

  "Think about it. Where there are blind folk, there are dogs." Niémans mimed the hunched figure of a blind man being led by an imaginary pooch. "Guide dogs for the blind, follow me? So there's no way I'm setting foot in that place."

  With those words, the superintendent left his startled lieutenant.

  He knocked on Captain Barnes's office door and opened it at once. The colossus was making separate piles of faxes: answers from hotels, restaurants and garages which were still flooding in. He looked like a grocer going through his stocks.

  "Superintendent?" Barnes raised an eyebrow. "Here, I've just received…"

  "I know."

  Niémans grabbed Costes's fax and glanced through it. It was a list of figures and long words, the chemical composition of the water from the eye-sockets.

  "Captain," the officer asked him, "Are there any power stations in the area? One that burns lignite?"

  Barnes looked skeptical.

  "None that I know of. Maybe to the west…There are several industrial areas in the direction of Grenoble."

  "Where could I find out?"

  "There is the Isere Industrial Board," Barnes answered. "But, hang on a second, I've got a better idea. This power station must cause a hell of a lot of pollution, I suppose?"

  Niémans grinned and showed him the fax covered with figures. "An acid bath."
r />   Barnes was jotting something down.

  "Go and see this guy. Alain Derteaux. He's a gardener who owns the tropical greenhouses on the way out of Guernon. He's our pollution expert. A militant ecologist. He knows the origin, the composition and the environmental consequences of the slightest whiff of gas or smoke in the entire region."

  Niémans was on his way out when the gendarme called him back. He was holding up his hands, palms turned toward the superintendent. Two massive mitts.

  "I was forgetting…I found out about the fingerprint problem. You know, Caillois's hands. He had an accident when he was a kid. He was helping his father repair their little yacht on Lake Annecy and he burnt his hands with some highly corrosive detergent. I contacted the lake authority and they remember all about the accident. Ambulance, hospital, the whole works…We could check it out, but in my opinion we'd be wasting our time."

  Niémans turned and grabbed the door handle.

  "Thanks, captain." He pointed at the faxes. "Keep up the good work."

  "You too," Barnes replied. "And good luck. That ecologist is a real pain in the ass."

  CHAPTER 15

  “…the entirety of our region has been poisoned and is now dying! Industrial zones have sprung up across the valleys, on the sides of the mountains, in the forests, contaminating the water table, infecting the soil, infiltrating the very air that we breathe…

  That's the Isère: gases and poisons at every altitude!"

  Alain Derteaux was a wizened man, with a narrow, wizened face. His beard and metallic glasses made him look like an escaped Mormon. Lurking in one of his greenhouses, he was fiddling with some jars which contained cotton wool and loose earth. Niémans butted into the speech, which had got under way as soon as he had introduced himself.

  "I'm sorry, but I am in desperate need of some information."

  "What? Oh yes, of course…" He looked condescending. "After all, you are a police officer…"

  "Do you know of a power station in the area which burns lignite?"

  "Lignite? Brown coal?…It's pure poison…"

  "Do you know of a place like that?"