Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  "A homozygous twin who acted just as Judith would have done, because she now knows the truth about her origins. That's why she uses a piano wire, as a reminder of her real mother's virtuoso talents. That's why she killed her victims in the rocky heights, there where her own father used to dig out crystals. That's why her own fingerprints could have been mistaken for Judith's…We're looking for her blood sister, Niémans."

  "Who is she?" Niémans exploded. "What new name was she given?"

  "I don't know. Her mother refused to tell me. But I've got her face."

  "Her face?"

  "A photograph of Judith, aged eleven. And so, since they are completely identical, of the murderer. I reckon that with this picture we can…"

  Niémans was trembling spasmodically.

  "Show it to me. Quick!"

  Karim produced the photo and handed it to him.

  "She's our killer, superintendent. She's avenging her dead sister. She's avenging her murdered father. She's avenging those smothered babies, those cheated families, all those messed up generations for the last fifty-odd years…What's up, Niémans?"

  The photo was twitching up and down in the superintendent's hands as he stared at it, his teeth clenched fit to shatter. Suddenly, Karim caught on and leant over toward him. He clutched his shoulder.

  "Jesus Christ, you know her, don't you, superintendent?"

  Niémans let the photo drop into the mud. He looked as though he was about to lose his wits completely. His broken voice croaked:

  "Alive. We've got to capture her alive."

  CHAPTER 59

  The two cops headed off through the rain. Gasping in shallow breaths, they did not exchange another word. They crossed several police road-blocks. The early dawn patrols glanced at them suspiciously. Neither of them suggested the idea of getting help. Niémans was off the case and Karim out of his patch. But still they both knew that this case was theirs, and nobody else's.

  They reached the campus. They drove along its tarmac tracks, past its gleaming lawns, before parking and clambering up to the top floor of the main building. They strode on together down to the end of the corridor and, hidden either side of the frame, knocked on the door. No answer. They smashed open the lock and went inside.

  Niémans brandished his Remington shotgun, loaded to the gills, which he had recovered from the police station. Karim was holding his Glock, pressed against his wrist by his torch. Two parallel beams of light and death.

  Nobody.

  They had just started a thorough search, when Niémans's pager bleeped. He was to call Marc Costes as soon as possible. He did so. His hands were still shaking and a terrible pain was gnawing at his innards. The young medic's voice was chirpy:

  "Niémans? I'm with Barnes. Just to tell you that we've found Sophie Caillois."

  "Alive?"

  "Oh yes, very much alive. She was heading for Switzerland on the train."

  "Has she said anything?"

  "She says that she's the next victim. And that she knows who the killer is."

  "Has she given you the name?"

  "She'll only speak to you, superintendent."

  "Keep her under close guard. Don't let anybody speak to her. Don't let anybody go near her. I'll be there in an hour's time."

  "In an hour? You're…you're onto something?"

  "Good-bye."

  "Wait! Is Abdouf with you?"

  Niémans chucked the cell phone to the young lieutenant and went back to his rapid explorations. Karim fixed his attention on the medic's voice:

  "I've got the note of the piano wire for you," the pathologist said. "B flat?"

  "How did you guess?"

  Karim hung up without answering. He looked at Niémans, who was staring at him from behind his rain-splattered spectacles.

  "We're not going to find anything here," he exclaimed, striding toward the door. "Let's head for the gym. It's her hide-out."

  The door of the gymnasium, an isolated building standing away from the campus, put up no resistance. The two men burst inside and spread out in a semi-circle. Karim was still holding his Glock just above the beam of his torch. As for Niémans, he had turned on the spot fixed on the top of his gun, following the line of the barrel.

  Nobody.

  They clambered over the floor mats, scrambled under the parallel bars and stared up into the darkness, where rings and knotted ropes hung down from the ceiling. Silence, as of the grave. The smell of cold sweat and ageing rubber. Shadows, patterned over with symmetric shapes, wooden forms and metal struts. Niémans stumbled into a trampoline. Karim immediately spun round. A moment's tension. A brief look. Both of them could sense the other's nerves giving off sparks like flints. Niémans whispered:

  "It's here. I'm sure it's here."

  Karim peered around again, then focused on the pipes of the central heating system. He walked alongside them, listening to the constant pumping of the boiler. He straddled a set of dumbbells and punch balls and managed to reach a grille of greasy metal bars, which was positioned plumb with the foam matting covering the walls. Without bothering about making a noise, he pulled away the grille and tore down the foam. This barrier concealed the doorway to the boiler room.

  He fired one bullet into the notched opening of the lock. With an explosion of shards and metal splinters, the door blew off its hinges. He finished off the job by crushing the panel down with his heel.

  Inside, everything was dark.

  He stuck his head through, then immediately pulled it back. He was ghastly white. The two men dived in together.

  A pungent stench gripped their nostrils.

  Blood.

  Blood on the walls, on the cast-iron pipes, on the rings of bronze lying on the floor. Blood on the ground, mopped up by handfuls of talcum powder, lying in stagnant, lumpy pools. Blood on the bulging sides of the boiler.

  The two men had no desire to be sick, it was as if their minds were detached from their bodies, suspended in terrified astonishment. They went further inside, flashing their torches around them. Piano wires glistened, twisted about the piping. Jerry-cans of gasoline lay on the ground, corked with stoppers of blood-stained cloth. The bars of the dumb-bells were stuck with scraps of dry flesh and dark blood clots. Rusty carpet cutters had been abandoned in puddles of solidified gore.

  As they ventured further and further inside, the wobbling beams from their torches showed up the panic that was gripping their limbs. Niémans spotted some colored objects on a bench. He knelt down. Iceboxes. He pulled one of them over to him and opened it. Without saying a word, he shone his spotlight into it for Karim's benefit.

  Eyes.

  Pale and bulbous, glittering with dewy brightness on a bed of ice.

  Niémans was already opening another icebox. This one contained the blue forms of frozen hands. Their nails were darkened with blood, their wrists marked with incisions. The superintendent drew back. Karim took him by the shoulders and groaned.

  They both now realised that they were no longer in a mere boiler room. They had entered inside the murderer's mind. Within her secret lair, where she had decided to slay the baby-killers.

  Karim's voice rang out, piercingly:

  "She's long gone. Nowhere near Guernon."

  "No," Niémans replied, getting to his feet. "She wants Sophie Caillois. The last name on her list. They've just brought Sophie into the station. And I'm sure she'll find out – or knows already – and is going to go looking for her."

  "With all those road-blocks? She won't be able to make a single move without being spotted and…"

  Karim fell silent. The two men looked at each other, their faces lit up by the rising beams of their torches. With one voice, they murmured:

  "The river."

  The obvious place was on the edge of the campus. There, where Caillois's body had been discovered. There, where the current fell away into a small lake, before resuming its course once more toward the town.

  The two policemen drove down to this limit, skidding over
the grass slopes, taking the one that led down to the river bank. Suddenly, as Karim was braking alongside the stone parapet, in the light of their headlamps they saw a figure dressed in a black, glimmering oilskin, and wearing a small rucksack. A face turned round and froze in the blinding beam of light. Karim recognised the helmet and the balaclava. The young woman was untying a long red inflatable dinghy, and pulling it toward her with the rope, as though mastering a frisky horse.

  Niémans muttered:

  "Don't shoot. And keep your distance. I'm arresting her on my own."

  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 son
ata. 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.