And twenty-four-year-old Julie Coray, a striking brunette from Rennes who’d recently arrived in Paris, landing this rather well-paid job as graphic designer for the French edition of Reader’s Digest Select Editions, would shudder every evening as she inserted her key in the lock of her small studio flat, on the top floor of a dilapidated building on rue Cels.
From the neighbouring desk, Robert Flageul – usually in charge of rewriting dramatic first-hand accounts and other ‘human interest stories’ that the review pre-digested each month with the aim of bringing tears to pensioners’ eyes – cut in, addressing the picture editor: ‘Plus you had it all wrong, Sylvie. ‘The beast of Bastille’, ‘the east Paris killer’, it’s all just tabloid cliché, I shouldn’t have to tell you that. The first crime attributed to this Guy Georges was Pascale Escarfail, the humanities student, murdered on the 24th of January ‘91 in her flat in the fourteenth arrondissement, on rue Delambre, just round the corner from Julie, which is a long way from Bastille, and more south than east. And other times he rampaged through the thirteenth, the tenth, the nineteenth… His turf seems pretty vast to me. Not to mention the assaults he must have committed before they’d made the link with him…’
Back in design, Julie Coray saw that her boss, the magazine’s art director, wasn’t yet back from his lunch with an illustrator at the Japanese restaurant next to the motorway, below the RER station. Knowing Gilles – a cigar-smoker and something of a foodie, too – he wouldn’t return before 3 p.m., so she had time to make a call before carrying on with the layout. Julie rang the mobile number of Claire, her best friend, a Breton like her. Claire Le Flohic was in her sixth year of medicine and was doing her internship at Cochin Hospital.
She answered after the fourth ring. ‘Oh, it’s you? Your name didn’t come up… You’re lucky I answered, I was about to reject the call, I’m on duty till tonight.’
‘I’m calling from the land line, at the magazine. Did you hear the news?’
The young intern answered in a voice quivering with excitement: ‘You bet! In fact, I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone but I’d known for two days they were going to get him. My cousin’s working at the Nantes lab that found the killer’s DNA. They’d been on the case for weeks, they compared it manually with 3,500 specimens before they found it. Suddenly there it was, just like that, bingo! They couldn’t believe their eyes! Amazing…!’
Twenty-four years old like Julie, Claire was a true-crime fan and passionate about forensic medicine, which she intended to specialise in. She was already pestering the professor to let her attend autopsies in criminal cases – in theory, off limits to trainees – during which Claire impressed him with her knowledge of heparic temperature, rigor mortis and dermabrasions, as well as marks from blows and wounds. The case of the ‘east Paris killer’ literally fascinated her, and Claire was convinced that she herself resembled one of the psychopath’s victims, found raped and murdered in an underground car park on boulevard Reuilly in January 1994: Catherine Rocher, a pretty, twenty-seven-year-old marketing assistant. ‘A tall girl with long brown hair, well mine’s more chestnut and very long, but we both have a straight nose, a long smiling face and we’re full of life! The killer goes for that kind of girl. If I were a psychological profiler, I’d infer that he’d been very unhappy when he was young, his parents probably knocked him about, he had a difficult childhood, is unemployed, has already done time for rape or assault, he lives in a squat, maybe prostitutes himself and is ashamed of it. He’s angry with the whole world and especially when he sees a beautiful girl go by, looking happy, he can’t help it, he’s compelled to follow her home, tie her up and rape her… And afterwards, he slashes her, aiming for the neck. There was blood all over the fl-’
Julie shuddered in disgust, thinking her friend a bit twisted for revelling in such macabre details. It was as if, from fantasising about this series of sexual murders, she’d begun to imagine herself as one of the victims, and got a kick out of it. ‘You’re right, I’m a real perv,’ Claire laughed.
‘Well anyway,’ Julie interrupted her, ‘it’s finally over… We can breathe…’
Through the bay window, she watched the light play on the buds of the trees on boulevard Louis Pasteur. It was a beautiful spring afternoon. This weekend, she’d go for a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, or the Luxembourg Gardens, or treat herself to a movie with Claire…
‘Don’t you believe it, darling!’ The medical student’s tone turned menacing. ‘Nothing’s over till he’s arrested! Right now the cops only have his name and his photo… And even if they catch him and he gets life without remission, he’ll be out after twenty years, you’ll see, if he doesn’t escape earlier! And then, when he’s out, he’ll start again. I’ve really studied his case: this ‘Guy Georges’, since now we know his name, is incurable. He’s not a madman, more an intelligent thug. He looks normal, maybe even likeable, it’s just he can’t resist, it’s in his past or his genes, he has to kill. Once a month if possible. He’s dodged the police so often he thinks he’s invincible. And at those moments, the wretched girl in front of him, tied up, weak and terrified, is just an object, not a human being. An object of rape and then murder.’
‘Claire, please stop…’
The intern chuckled. ‘OK, I’m stopping, you poor thing. But nothing’s over, you’ll see. He knows he’s a marked man, he could get even more dangerous, take a girl hostage, I don’t know… So you still have to be extra careful going home tonight, OK?’
Julie rolled her eyes and pulled a face.
‘All right, all right. And if I’m too scared when I come out of the station, I’ll call you to come and escort me to rue Cels, OK?’
The two friends burst out laughing, blew each other kisses down the phone and ended the call at the same time.
The afternoon went by like a dream. Concentrating on the Mac screen, on her photos, titles and fonts, and files to be sent to the printer, Julie wasn’t aware of time passing. It was the end of March, the days were growing longer, but eventually the light faded… At 7 p.m., Gilles stood up, put on his raincoat and waved goodbye to his assistant. ‘Right, see you tomorrow, Julie. I’ll leave you to finish off the cover. Send it to Magnus, wait for his approval, then you can go home.’
‘But…’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. See you then, bye!’
Magnus Laksson, a Finn who’d settled in the US, supervised the art direction for all the international editions. His trenchant opinions, utter lack of diplomacy, and ultra-conservative view of what Reader’s Digest should be in America and elsewhere, made him the bête noire of art directors working under him. Julie sent him the mockup of the cover accompanied by a few polite phrases in her approximate English and waited for the verdict, which, with the time difference (Laksson had no doubt gone for lunch), only arrived on her screen at 10.30 p.m., French time.