“And you know what’s most disturbing of all? It’s that, strangely enough, Mahmoud Abd el-Aal is dead.”
The young woman turned away and walked toward the glass door. She glanced into the hall. The guard hadn’t moved.
“I’m not sure what to tell you, Inspector. I’m here simply to translate, and—”
“I’ve noticed how much Noureddine was harassing you, and you were trying to avoid him every way possible without succeeding. What is it? An exchange of services? Or is it a custom in your country that you have to agree to whatever that tub of lard says?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“I saw you trembling several times when looking at those photos, or at the descriptions of the case. You were once the same age as those girls when they died. You were in school, just like them.”
Nahed pursed her lips. Her hands squeezed each other tightly. With an evasive gaze, she glanced at her watch.
“It’s nearly time for our meeting with Michael Lebrun, and—”
“And I’m not going. I can drink French wine any day of the week back in France.”
“You might offend him.”
He picked up a photo of one of the smiling girls and pushed it toward Nahed.
“I couldn’t care less about diplomacy and canapés. You don’t think these girls deserve our attention?”
A weighty silence. Nahed was supremely beautiful, and Sharko knew enough not to trust a woman solely because she was beautiful. But beyond this he sensed a hurt, an open wound that sometimes clouded her jade-colored eyes.
“Very well. What can I do for you, Inspector?”
Sharko approached the blinds in turn and lowered his voice.
“None of the cops in this station will talk to me. Lebrun’s hands are tied by the embassy. Find me Abd el-Aal’s address. He must have a widow, maybe children or brothers. I want to talk to them.”
After a long silence, Nahed gave in.
“I’ll try, but especially—”
“Mum’s the word, you can count on me. When I get my phone back, I’ll call Lebrun and tell him I’m very sorry but I’m not feeling well. The heat, jet lag… I’ll tell him I’m coming back here tomorrow, just to wrap things up. Your job is to meet me at the hotel at eight, hopefully with the address.”
She hesitated.
“No, not at the hotel. Take a taxi and”—she jotted a few words onto a slip of paper and handed it to him—“give him this paper. He’ll know where to take you.”
“Where is it?”
“In front of the Church of Saint Barbara.”
“Saint Barbara? That’s not a very Muslim name.”
“The church is in the Coptic district of Old Cairo, in the southern part of the city. The name belonged to a young girl who was martyred for attempting to convert her father to Christianity.”
19
Freyrat, in the heart of the Lille medical area, late afternoon. The crucible of psychiatry. A two-story concrete monster, the meeting place of every mental deviance: schizophrenia, paranoia, trauma, psychosis. Lucie entered the austere structure, asking at the reception for Ludovic Sénéchal’s room. She wanted to be the one to tell him about the death of his old friend Claude Poignet. She was directed to the Denecker Wing on the second floor.
The diminutive room would have depressed a clown. The out-of-reach television was on. Ludovic was stretched out on his mattress, hands behind his head. He slowly turned his face toward his visitor and smiled.
“Lucie…”
Surprised, she came forward.
“You can see?”
“I can make out shapes and colors. People not wearing lab coats are most likely visitors. What other woman would come visit me?”
“I’m happy it’s getting better.”
“Dr. Martin says my sight will return gradually. At this point it’s just a matter of two or three days.”
“How did they do that?”
“Hypnosis. They understood what wasn’t working. Or more to the point, they understood without understanding.”
Lucie felt ill at ease. She hated playing the painful role of death’s messenger. Meeting the eyes of a victim’s loved ones was probably the hardest part of her job. She did everything she could to put off the announcement. Ludovic was a sensitive soul and not in the best shape right now.
“Tell me about it.”
The man sat up. His pupils had regained a reassuring mobility.
“The psychiatrist explained it all to me. He put me under hypnosis, then asked me to tell him what had happened in the hours and minutes before I went blind. So I related how my day had been spent. What I bought from the old collector in Liège, the anonymous reel discovered in the attic. Being alone in my mini-cinema, watching movies all night long. Then the images from the anonymous short, as they appear. The slit eye, the shots of the little girl on the swing. And it was there, strangely, that I started telling him about my father, just out of the blue. The women he’d bring back to the house when I was a kid, a few years after my mother’s death.”
“You never breathed a word of this to me.”
A small, dry laugh floated across the room.
“Look who’s talking! We spent weeks chatting online, seven months flirting, and I know practically nothing about your private life. Sure, I know you’re a cop and that you have two daughters who I got along with, but other than that, what is there?”
“That’s not what we’re talking about.”
He sighed, looking sad.
“With you, it’s never what we’re talking about. Well, anyway… It came up suddenly, under hypnosis. The naked women I’d sometimes see coming out of my father’s room. All that… breathing I’d hear through the walls. I wasn’t even ten yet. The shrink understood that the block might have come from there. Something, probably some image, had brought those memories back up and triggered my hysterical blindness.”
Lucie suspected it was related to the subliminal images. Without the censorship of the conscious mind, they had slammed against the deepest recesses of Ludovic’s psyche and kicked up a mess.
“But that’s not what drove me blind, because I could still describe what happened next in the film. Talk about the little girl. When she ate, or slept. When she brushed the camera away with her hand, as if she was annoyed. Then, suddenly, the psychiatrist told me I had screamed under hypnosis and he’d had to wake me. He managed to calm me down and asked what had happened. So then I started telling him about the episode with the rabbit.”
Lucie immediately straightened up. The strange Quebecer, on the phone, had also mentioned rabbits. He had revealed that the whole thing started with children and rabbits.
“What rabbit?”
Ludovic tensed and pulled his knees against his chest.
“I must have been eight or nine. One day, my father brought me into his workshop, where he kept all his tools. There was a rabbit that had taken shelter in the back of an old U-bend conduit. A large wild rabbit. I was small enough to crawl through the conduit and catch it, but not my father. So he ordered me to do it. And I did. I crawled on all fours and forced the animal to leave its hiding place. My father grabbed it by the ears. The rabbit was bleeding from its hind paws—it was struggling to get free. I cried out for him to let it go, but my father was beside himself. He took an ax and…”
His two hands flew to his face, as if he’d just received a spurt of blood.
“That scene… Until the hypnosis, I’d forgotten it, Lucie. It had completely gone out of my mind.”
“More like it had been buried way deep. So deep that nothing had been able to bring it back to the surface. In the anonymous film, did you see any rabbits?”
“No, no…”