Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  Joisneau nodded. Terpentes too, in a sign of superior agreement, as though all these ideas were being plucked straight out of his head.

  "That should keep you busy till we get the results of the autopsy," Niémans concluded. "I don't need to add that this has got to be kept hush-hush. Not a word to the local press. Not a word to a single soul."

  They parted company on the steps of the University Hospital, striding off through the morning mist. In the shadow of that huge edifice, which looked at least two hundred years old, they got into their cars, heads down, shoulders hunched, without a word or a glance.

  The hunt was on.

  CHAPTER 4

  Pierre Niémans and Eric Joisneau went straight to the university, which was on the edge of the town. The superintendent asked the inspector to wait for him in the library, in the main building, while he paid a call on the university vice-chancellor, whose office took up the top floor of the administrative block, a hundred yards away.

  The officer entered a vast 1970s construction, which had already been renovated, with a lofty ceiling and walls of different pastel colors. On the top floor, in a sort of antechamber occupied by a secretary and her tiny desk, Niémans gave his name and asked to see Monsieur Vincent Luyse. While waiting, he looked at the photographs on the walls, showing triumphant students brandishing cups and medals, on ski slopes or in raging torrents.

  A few minutes later, Pierre Niémans was standing in front of the vice-chancellor. A man with wiry hair, a flat nose, and skin the color of talc. Vincent Luyse's face was a strange mixture of Black African characteristics and anaemic pallor. A few sunbeams shone through the stormy gloom, slicing through the half-light. The vice-chancellor asked the policeman to take a seat, then started nervously massaging his wrists.

  "So?" he asked in a dry voice.

  "So what?"

  "Have you discovered anything?"

  Niémans stretched his legs.

  "I've just got here, vice-chancellor. I need a little time to settle in.

  Meanwhile, just answer my questions."

  Luyse stiffened in his chair. His entire office was made of wood, dotted with metallic mobiles reminiscent of flower stalks on a steel planet.

  "Have you had any other tricky incidents in your university?" Niémans asked calmly.

  "Tricky? No, not at all."

  "No drugs? No thefts? No fights?"

  "No."

  "There aren't any gangs, or cliques? No youngsters giving each other funny ideas?"

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  "I'm thinking about role-playing. You know, games full of ceremonies and rituals…"

  "No. We don't have any of that sort of thing. Our students are a clearheaded crowd."

  Niémans remained silent. The vice-chancellor sized him up: crew cut, big build, grip of an MR73 sticking out of his coat. Luyse wiped his face, then said, as though trying to convince himself:

  "I've been told that you are an excellent policeman."

  Niémans responded by staring back at the vice-chancellor. Luyse turned away his eyes and went on:

  "Superintendent, all I want is for you to find the murderer in as short a time as possible. The new academic year is about to begin and…"

  "So there are no students on the campus yet?"

  "Only a few boarders. They live on the top floor of the main building over there. Then there are also a few lecturers who are preparing their courses."

  "Can I have a list of them?"

  "Why…" a hesitation, "of course…"

  "What about Rémy Caillois? What was he like?"

  "An extremely discreet librarian. A loner."

  "Was he popular with the students?"

  "Yes, yes of course he was."

  "Where did he live? In Guernon?"

  "No, here on the campus. With his wife, on the top floor of the main building. Alongside the boarders."

  "Rémy Caillois was twenty-five. That's rather young to be married these days, isn't it?"

  "Rémy and Sophie Caillois were both students here. Before that, I believe they met while at the campus school, which is reserved for our lecturers' children. They are…they were childhood sweethearts."

  Niémans got briskly to his feet.

  "Most helpful, vice-chancellor. Thank you."

  The superintendent headed off at once, fleeing the smell of fear that pervaded the place.

  Books.

  Everywhere, in the large university library, numerous racks of books were piled up under the neon lights. Metal shelving holding up veritable walls of perfectly arranged paper. Dark spines. Gold or silver chasing. Labels, all of which bore the crest of the University of Guernon. In the middle of the deserted room stood formica-topped tables, divided into small glass carrels. As soon as Niémans had entered the room, he was reminded of a prison visiting-room.

  The atmosphere was at once luminous and stuffy, spacious and cramped.

  "The best lecturers teach at this university," Eric Joisneau explained. "The cream of the south-east of France. Law, economics, literature, psychology, sociology, physics…And especially medicine – all the top medics of Isère teach here and consult at the University Hospital, which is in fact where the old university used to be. The buildings have been entirely renovated. Half the people in the département go there when they're ill and all the mountain dwellers were born in its maternity clinic."

  Niémans listened to him, arms crossed, leaning back onto one of the reading tables.

  "Sounds like you know what you're talking about."

  Joisneau picked up a book at random.

  "I studied at this university. I started doing law…I wanted to be a lawyer."

  "And you became a policeman?"

  The lieutenant looked at Niémans. In the white neon light, his eyes were gleaming.

  "When I took my degree, I was suddenly scared that I was going to get shit bored. So I enrolled in the police academy of Toulouse. I reckoned that the police meant an action-packed career, full of risks. A career that would have surprises in store for me…"

  "And now you're disappointed?"

  The lieutenant put the book back on the shelf. His slight smile faded.

  "Not today, I'm not. Definitely not today." He stared at Niémans. "That body…How could anybody do that?"

  Niémans ducked the question.

  "What was the atmosphere like here? Anything special?"

  "No. Lots of middle-class kids, full of clichés about life, about politics, about the ideas you were supposed to have…And the children of farmers and workers, too. Even more idealistic. And more aggressive. Anyway, we were all heading for Welfare, so…"

  "There wasn't any funny business? No strange cliques?"

  "No. Nothing. Except, that is, there was a sort of university elite. A microcosm made up of the children of the lecturers themselves. Some of them were real high fliers. They won all the prizes every year. Even the sports awards. We were completely left standing."

  Niémans recalled the photographs of champions in the antechamber of Luyse's office. He asked:

  "Did these students make up a real clan? Could they all be working together on some sick idea?"

  Joisneau burst out laughing.

  "What do you mean? A kind of…conspiracy?"

  It was Niémans's turn to get up and wander along the bookshelves.

  "A librarian is at the center of a university. An ideal target. Imagine a group of students dabbling in some sort of hocus pocus.

  A sacrifice, a ritual…When choosing their victim, they could quite easily have thought of Caillois."

  "Then forget about the whiz kids I just mentioned. They were too busy getting firsts in their exams to worry about anything else."

  Niémans walked on between the rows of reddish brown books. Joisneau followed him.

  "A librarian," he resumed, "is also the person who lends books…Who knows what everybody is reading, what everybody is studying…Maybe he knew something he shouldn't have."

/>   "You don't kill someone like that for…And what sort of secret reading scheme do you imagine these students had?"

  Niémans spun round.

  "I don't know. But I mistrust intellectuals."

  "Have you already got an idea? A suspicion?"

  "None at all. Right now, anything is possible. A fight. Revenge. Intellectual weirdoes. Or homosexual ones. Or quite simply a prowler, a maniac, who stumbled onto Caillois quite by chance in the mountains."

  The superintendent fingered the spines of the books.

  "You see, I'm not biased. But here is where we're going to start. Dig out all the books that could have some bearing on the murder."

  "What sort of bearing?"

  Niémans went back down the rows of shelving and emerged into the main reading-room. He headed for the librarian's office, which was situated at the far end, on a raised platform, overlooking the carrels. A computer sat on the desk. Ring-binders lay in the drawers. Niémans patted the dark screen.

  "In here there must be a list of all the books that are consulted, or borrowed, every day. I want you to put some of your men on the job. The most bookish ones you can find. Get the boarders to help as well. I want them to pick out all the books that deal with evil, violence, torture and religious sacrifices. Look through the ethnology titles, for example. I also want them to note down the names of all the students who have regularly consulted this sort of book. And dig me out Caillois's thesis."

  "What about me?"

  "You question the boarders. One at a time. They live here night and day, so they must know the university from top to bottom. The habits, the feel of the place, any weird kids…I want to know what the others thought of Caillois. I also want you to find out about his walks in the mountains. Find his fellow hikers. Discover who knew the routes he took. Who could have met him up there…"

  Joisneau glanced skeptically at the superintendent. Niémans walked over to him: He was now speaking in whispers:

  "I'll tell you what we have on our hands. We have an incredible murder, a pallid, smooth, hunched-up body bearing the traces of unspeakable suffering. The whole thing stinks of craziness. Right now, it's our little secret. We have a few hours, maybe a little longer, to solve this business. After that, the media will get involved, the pressure will build up, and emotions start to run wild. So concentrate. Dive into the nightmare. Give all you've got. That's how we'll unmask the face of evil."

  The lieutenant looked terrified.

  "You really think that, in a few hours, we can…"

  "Do you want to work with me, or not?" Niémans butted in. "Look, this is the way I see things. When a murder has been committed, you have to look at every surrounding detail as though it was a mirror. The body of the victim, the people who knew him, the scene of the crime…Everything reflects the truth, some particular aspect of the murder, see what I mean?"

  He tapped the computer screen.

  "This screen, for instance. When it's been switched on, it will become the mirror of Rémy Caillois's daily existence. The mirror of his working life, of his thoughts. It will contain elements, reflections that may be of use to us. We have to dive in. Get through to the other side."

  He stood up and opened his arms.

  "We're in a hall of mirrors, Joisneau, a labyrinth of reflected images. So take a good look. At everything. Because, somewhere inside one of those mirrors, in a dead angle, the murderer is hiding."

  Joisneau gaped.

  "You seem a bit clever for a man of action…"

  The superintendent slapped his chest with the back of his hand. "This isn't abstract theory, Joisneau. It's purely practical."

  "And what about you? Who…who are you going to question?"

  "Me? I'm going to question our witness, Fanny Ferreira. And then Sophie Caillois, the victim's wife."

  Niémans winked.

  "The ladies, Joisneau. That's what I call being purely practical."

  CHAPTER 5

  Under the dreary sky, the asphalt road snaked across the campus, leading to each of its gray buildings with their blue, rusting windows. Niémans drove slowly – he had obtained a map of the university – on the way to an isolated gymnasium. He reached another block of fluted concrete, which looked more like a bunker than a sports center. He got out of his car and breathed deeply. It was drizzling.

  He examined the construction of the campus, situated at a few hundred yards' distance. His parents, too, had been teachers, but in small secondary schools in the suburbs of Lyons. He had practically no memories of them. Family ties had soon seemed to him to be a weakness, a lie. He had rapidly realised that he was going to have to fight alone and, accordingly, the sooner the better. From the age of thirteen, he had asked to be sent to a boarding school. They had not dared refuse this voluntary exile, but he could still remember his mother's sobs from the other side of his bedroom wall: it was a sound in his head and, at the same time, a physical sensation, something damp and warm on his skin. So, he had decamped.

  Four years spent boarding. Four years of solitude and physical training, apart from his lessons. All his hopes were then pinned on one target: the army. At seventeen, Pierre Niémans, who had passed his exams with flying colors, went for his three days' induction and asked to join the officers' training school. When the military doctor told him that he had been discharged as unfit and explained the reasons for this decision, Niémans suddenly understood. His anxieties were so manifest that they had betrayed him, despite all his ambition. He realised that his destiny would always be that long, seamless corridor, plastered with blood, where, at the very end, dogs howled in the darkness…

  Other adolescents would have given up and quietly listened to the psychiatrists' opinions. Not Pierre Niémans. He persisted, and he began training again, with a redoubled rage and determination. If Pierre could not be a soldier, then he would pick another battlefield: the streets, the anonymous struggle against everyday evil. He would devote all of his strength and his soul to a war with no flags and no glorious deaths. Niémans would become a policeman. With this in mind, he spent months practising the answers to psychiatric tests. He then enrolled in Cannes-Ecluse police academy. And the era of violence began: top marks at target practice. Niémans continued to improve, to grow stronger. He became an outstanding policeman. Tenacious, violent, vicious.

  He started working in local police stations then became a sharpshooter in what was to become the Rapid Intervention Unit. Special operations began.

  He killed his first man. At that instant, he made a pact with himself and, for the last time, contemplated his own fate. No, he would never be a proud warrior, a valiant army officer. But he would be a restless, obstinate street fighter, who would drown his own fears in the violence and the fury of the concrete jungle.

  Niémans took a deep breath of mountain air. He thought about his mother, who had been dead for years. He thought about his past, which now seemed like an endless canyon, and his memories, which had splintered, then faded, making a last stand against oblivion.

  As though lost in a dream, Niémans suddenly noticed a little dog. The creature was muscular, its short coat glistening in the mist. Its eyes, two drops of opaque lacquer, were staring at the policeman.

  Waggling its behind, it was approaching. The officer froze. The dog drew ever nearer, just a few steps away. Its moist nose twitched. Then it abruptly started growling. Its eyes shone. It had smelt fear. The fear oozing out of this man.

  Niémans was petrified.

  His limbs felt as though they had been gripped by a mysterious force. His blood was being sucked away by an invisible siphon, somewhere in his guts. The dog barked, showing its teeth. Niémans understood the process. Fear produced an odor which the dog smelt and which provoked a reaction of dread and hostility. Fear feeding on fear. The dog barked then rolled its neck, grinding its teeth together. The cop drew his gun.

  "Clarisse! Clarisse! Come back, Clarisse!"

  Niémans re-emerged from his spell in the cooler. Through a re
d veil, he saw a gray man in a zip-up cardigan. He was approaching rapidly.

  "You got a screw loose, or what?"

  Niémans mumbled:

  "Police. Get lost. And take your mutt with you."

  The man was stunned.

  "Jesus Christ, I don't believe this. Come on, Clarisse, come on, little darling…"

  Master and hound moved off. Niémans tried to gulp back his saliva. His throat felt harsh, dry as an oven. He shook his head, put his gun away and paced round the building. As he turned left, he forced himself to remember: how long was it now since he had seen his shrink?

  Around the second corner of the gymnasium, the superintendent came across the woman.

  Fanny Ferreira was standing near an open door and sanding down a red-colored foam board. The officer imagined that it must be the raft she used to float downstream.

  "Good morning," he said with a bow.

  He was back among warmth and assurance.

  Fanny raised her eyes. She must have been twenty, at most. Her skin was dark and her hair generously curly, with slight ringlets around her temples and a heavy cascade over her shoulders. Her face was somber and velvety, but her eyes had a penetrating, almost indecent, clarity.

  "I'm Superintendent Pierre Niémans. I'm investigating the murder of Rémy Caillois"

  "Pierre Niémans?" she repeated in astonishment. "But that's amazing!"

  "Sorry?"

  She nodded toward a small radio, lying on the ground.

  "They were just talking about you on the news. Apparently, you arrested two murderers last night, just near the Parc des Princes. Which is rather good. But they also said that one of them was disfigured. Which is not so good. Are you omnipresent, or what?"

  "No, I just drove all night."

  "But why are you here? Aren't our own local cops up to it?"

  "Let's just say I'm part of the reinforcements."

  Fanny went back to work – she damped down the oblong surface of the board, then pressed a folded sheet of sandpaper onto it with both palms. Her body looked stocky and solid. She was dressed casually – neoprene diver's leggings, a sailor's jumper, light-colored leather boots, which were tightly laced. The veiled light cast a soft rainbow over the entire scene.