Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers

CHAPTER 51

Karim tore down the yellow no-entry cordon and knelt in front of the door of the tomb, which was still ajar. He slipped on his gloves, stuck his fingers into the gap and pulled violently. It gave way. Without a moment's hesitation, he switched on his torch and slid inside the vault. Bent double, he edged down the steps. The beam of light bounced back off a mass of dark water – a veritable underground lake. The rain had got in through the door and half filled the vault.

He said to himself: "There's no other choice." He held his breath and dropped into the water. Holding his torch in his left hand, he advanced, Indian-style, in a sort of breast-stroke. The ray of light cut through the darkness. As he entered further into the vault, the trickling of the rain rang deeper and the smell of mould and decay grew heavier. With his face turned up toward the ceiling, he spat out the water and paddled onwards, caught between the lake and the arched roof.

Suddenly, his head hit the coffin. In a panic, he screamed, span round and slowed his movements, in an attempt to calm himself down. He then looked at the little casket that was floating on the waters like a boat.

He repeated to himself: "There's no other choice." Then he swam round the coffin, examining each of its sides. The lid was still screwed down, but he noticed something which he had not had time to spot that morning, when the keeper had caught him trespassing. Around the screws, the pale wood was coming away in darker splinters. The paint had cracked. Someone had – perhaps – opened the coffin. "There's no other choice." From his jacket pocket, Karim produced a pair of folding pliers, the two ends of which formed the blade of a screwdriver, and tried to prise open the lid. Little by little, the wood started to give way. At last, the final screw loosened. Banging his head against the ceiling – the water was still rising and was now up to his shoulders – Karim managed to pull away the lid. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve then, telling himself to hold' his breath, he peered inside.

He need not have bothered. He felt as though he were already dead himself.

The coffin did not contain a child's skeleton. Nor had there been a hoax, or any sign of desecration. It was filled to the brim with tiny sharp white bones. A sort of rodents' burial ground. Thousands of dried out skeletons. Chalky snouts, as pointed as daggers. Ribcages, as vivid as claws. Countless scraps, as thin as matchsticks, coming from tiny femurs, tibias and humeruses.

Still leaning against the edge, Karim's muscles started to give way and he reached out a hand toward that charnel-house. Those myriads of skeletons, reflecting the beam of his torch, looked like a mass prehistoric grave. It was then that he heard a voice coming from behind him, breaking through the din of the rain.

"You shouldn't have come back, Karim."

He did not need to turn round to know who had spoken. He clenched his fists and lowered his head until it was resting on the bones, then murmured:

"Crozier, don't tell me you're involved in this business…" The voice answered:

"I should never have let you loose on this case."

Karim glanced rapidly at the doorway of the vault. Henri Crozier's figure was clearly outlined. He was holding an MR73 model. Manhurin – the same gun as Niémans used. Six bullets in the cylinder. Fast-loading magazines in his pocket. A few seconds to empty it, then reload it, without any risk of it jamming. A precision piece. The lieutenant asked:

"What the fucking hell's your role in all this?"

The man did not reply. Lifting up his soaked elbows, Karim tried again:

"Can I at least get out of this shit-hole?"

Crozier gestured briefly with his gun.

"Come toward me. Only slowly. Nice and slowly."

Letting go of the desecrated coffin, Karim slipped through the water and headed for the steps. His torch, which he had put back between his teeth, flickered up crazily at the stone ceiling. Whirling flashes, like stabs of lightning.

The lieutenant reached the staircase and heaved himself up it. As he ascended, Crozier pulled back, keeping his gun on him. The rain was beating down in gusts. Soaked to the skin, the Arab got to his feet and faced the superintendent. He asked again:

"What's your part in all this? What do you know?"

Crozier replied at last:

"It was in 1980. I spotted her as soon as she arrived. This is my town. And it's small. My patch. What's more, I was practically the only cop in Sarzac at the time. That woman who'd come to work as a primary school teacher, she was too beautiful, too powerful…I immediately sensed there was something wrong about her."

The Arab whispered:

"Crozier, the Guardian of Sarzac"

"Yeah. So I looked into things. I found out that she had a child with her…And I got her to confide in me. She told me everything. She said that the demons wanted to kill her child."

"I know all that already."

"What you don't know is that I decided to protect that family. I had false papers made for them, I…"

Karim felt as if he was on the edge of a precipice.

"Who were these demons?"

"One day, two men came to town. They said they were collecting old school books. They'd come from Guernon, the same town as Fabienne. So I guessed at once that they were the demons…"

"What were their names?"

"Caillois and Sertys."

"Don't fuck me about. At that time, Rémy Caillois and Philippe Sertys were only about ten years old!"

"Those weren't their names. They were called Etienne Caillois and René Sertys. They must have been about forty. With bony faces, and wild staring eyes like fanatics."

A taste of acid rose up into Karim's throat. Why had he not thought of that? The "crime" of the blood-red rivers went back several generations. Before Rémy Caillois there had been Etienne Caillois; before Philippe Sertys, René Sertys. He murmured:

"And then?"

"I acted the inquisitorial cop. ID check, the works. But they were clean. As straight as dies. Still, they left again without having been able to identify Fabienne and her child. At least, that's what I thought. But, as soon as she heard that they'd been nosing around Sarzac, Fabienne wanted to beat it. So, I didn't ask her any questions. We just destroyed all the records, tore pages out of registers, wiped out every trace…Fabienne had changed her child's identity, but…"

Karim interrupted him. A curtain of rain lay between the two men.

"Young Sertys came back here on Sunday night. Do you have any idea what he was looking for in this vault?"

"No."

Abdouf pointed back at the tomb.

"That flicking coffin's full of rats' bones. It's a goddam nightmare. What does it all mean?"

"I don't know. You shouldn't have opened that coffin. You should respect the dead…"

"Who? Where's Judith Hérault's body? Is she really dead?"

"Dead and buried, my boy. I was the one who arranged her funeral."

The Arab shivered.

"And you tend the grave?"

"Yes, at night."

Walking up to the barrel of the gun, Karim suddenly roared: "Where is she? Where is Fabienne Hérault now?"

"You mustn't harm her."

"Superintendent, this case goes far deeper than a simple profanation of a cemetery. There have been murders."

"I know."

"You know?"

"It was all over the TV. On the late night news."

"So you know that there's a series of murders, the bodies mutilated and set in macabre positions, the works!…Crozier, tell me where I can find Fabienne Hérault!"

In the darkness, Crozier's face was knotted with tension. His gun was still pressing against the Arab's torso.

"You mustn't harm her."

"No one's going to harm her, Crozier. But now Fabienne Hérault's the only person who can shed a bit of light on this chaos! Everything points to her daughter, right? Everything points to Judith Hérault, who should be there in that tomb!"

A few seconds more under that overpowering deluge then, slowly, Crozier lowered his gun. The Arab knew that if he was going to solve a case once in his life, then this was the one. Finally, the superintendent said:

"Fabienne lives about twelve miles from here, on the Herzine hill. I'm coming with you. If you harm her, I'll kill you."

Karim smiled and pulled back. Then he swung round and kicked the superintendent full in the throat. Crozier was thrown back against the marble monument.

The Arab leant down over the unconscious old man. He did up his hood and pulled him under the shelter of a granite tombstone. Then he silently apologised.

But what he needed right now was a free hand.

CHAPTER 52

"It's hot stuff, Abdouf. Very hot stuff."

Patrick Astier's voice broke through a whirlwind of interferences. The cell phone had rung while Karim had been driving across a veritable steppe of gray rock. The cop had leapt out of his skin and narrowly avoided skidding off the road. Astier went on enthusiastically:

"Your two missions were time bombs waiting to go off. And they both blew up on me"

Karim felt his nerves harden into steel beneath his skin.

"Go on," he declared, pulling onto the side of the road and switching off his headlights.

"Firstly, Sylvain Hérault's accident. I found the police records. And got confirmation of what you'd been told. Sylvain Hérault was killed on his bicycle, on the D17, by an unidentified car. A shifty case. And left unsolved. At the time, the gendarmerie conducted a routine enquiry. No witnesses. No motive that could have suggested another explanation…"

His intonation indicated that he was waiting for a question. So Karim dutifully asked it:

"But?"

"But," the chemist went on, "Since that distant period, we have made giant strides in the treatment of photographs."

Karim sensed that another science lecture was about to start. He butted in:

"Please, Astier, just get to the point, will you?"

"OK. So I found some photos in the file. Black-and-white prints taken by a local hack. In them, you can make out the tyre-tracks of the bike, mixed in with the traces left by the car. They're all so small and out of focus that you wonder why they bothered to keep them."

"And?"

The scientist paused, for dramatic effect.

"And, Grenoble University boasts a state-of-the-art optical laboratory."

"For fuck's sake, Astier, get on with it!"

"Hang on a sec. Those guys can do things to a photograph that you would just not believe! They make a digital analysis, blow it up, contrast it, get rid of any imperfections, change the angles…to cut a long story short, they can dig out things that are invisible to the naked eye. They're good friends of mine. So I thought it might be a good idea to wake them up and get them onto the case. I used the fingerprint analyser as a scanner and sent them the photos. Even when woken up in the middle of the night, those guys are still absolute geniuses. They treated the film straight away and…"

"AND WHAT?"

Another one of Astier's pregnant pauses.

"Their analysis tells quite a different tale from the official version. They blew up the tyre-tracks of the bike and the car. By heightening the contrast, they were able to examine the direction of the prints on the tarmac. Their first conclusion is that Sylvain Hérault was not on his way to work, up in the mountains, as it says in the file. The tyre-prints run the other way round. Hérault was cycling toward the university. I've checked that on a map."

"But…What about his wife Fabienne's testimony?"

"Fabienne Hérault lied. I've read her statement. She just confirmed what the gendarmerie suspected, that the crystaller was going to work on the Belledonne. Which is totally untrue."

Karim clenched his teeth. Another lie. Another mystery. Astier went on:

"But that's not all. My experts also took a look at the tire-prints made by the car." Another pause, and then: "They go in both directions, Abdouf. The driver ran over the body once, then reversed over it a second time. It's a flicking murder. As cold-blooded as a snake in its egg."

Karim was no longer listening. His heart was now beating against his chest. This, then, was the motive for the Hérault family's vengeance. Apart from the escapades of the mother and daughter, that life spent in fear of pursuit, which had indirectly brought about Judith's death, there had first been a murder. Sylvain Hérault. The demons had begun by wiping out the "strong man" of the family, and had then pursued the women.

Fabienne Hérault. Judith Hérault. Abdouf's thoughts were sparking wildly.

"What about the hospital?" he asked.

"That's time bomb number two. I looked at the list of births for 1972. The page corresponding to 23 May has been torn out."

This story sounded rather too familiar to Karim – a déjà vu from another life that he had lived out in a mere few hours.

"But that's not the strangest part," Astier continued. "I also looked through the archives, in the section where children's medical records are kept. It's a real labyrinth and it's starting to get damp. This time, I found Judith's file easily enough. So you see what that means, don't you? Something else happened that night. Something which was noted down in the main register, but not in the child's personal records. That page has been torn out to hide this mysterious event, not to conceal the birth of your Judith. I asked a few nurses about it, but they were all dropping off to sleep: What's more they were too young to bother with Uncle Astier's stories…"

Karim realised that the chemist was playing the fool to chase away his own fears. He could sense it, despite the interference on the line. He thanked him and hung up.

He could already see the large, grassy Herzine hill jutting up four hundred yards away from him.

On those shadowy slopes, the truth was waiting for him.

CHAPTER 53

Fabienne Hérault's house.

The top of a hill. Stone walls. Dark windows.

Pale clouds fluttered across the thick sky. The rain had stopped. Flurries of mist floated slowly along the emerald slopes. All around, the lonely horizon drew away. A heap of stones. Nothing and no one in a radius of twelve miles.

Karim parked his car and clambered up the grassy flank. The house reminded him of the place she had lived in near Sarzac – those fat stones gave it the look of a Celtic burial mound. Near the building, he spotted a huge white satellite dish. He drew his gun. And noticed that a bullet was already in its breech. He found that fact reassuring.

Before going up to the front door, he checked the garage, which contained a five-door Volvo under a pale tarpaulin. It was not locked. He opened the bonnet and, in a series of rapid gestures, demolished the fuse box. Now, whatever happened, if things went wrong, Fabienne Hérault was not going anywhere.

He strode up to the door and knocked lightly. Gun in hand, he stepped back from the threshold. A few seconds of silence, then the door opened. Noiselessly. Without any click of a lock. Fabienne Hérault evidently no longer felt in danger.

Karim stood in the light and concealed his weapon.

He was confronted with a figure as tall as he was, whose eyes were drilling into him. Shoulders like cliffs, a translucent perfectly-formed face, ringed by a brown head of curls, that were almost fuzzy. Glasses with frames as thick as walking sticks. Karim would have been incapable of describing that dreamy, almost absent face.

He controlled his voice:

"Police. Lieutenant Karim Abdouf."

No sign of astonishment from the woman. She was looking at Karim over her glasses, her head gently swaying. Then she lowered her gaze to the hand which was concealing the Glock. Through those lenses, Abdouf thought he detected a wicked gleam. "What can I do for you?" she asked warmly.

Karim remained motionless, petrified in the nocturnal silence of the countryside.

"Come in. For a start."

The shutters were down, most of the furniture was covered with striped cloths. A television screen gleamed darkly, and the lacquered notes of a piano glinted. Karim noticed the score which was open above the keyboard: Frederick Chopin's Sonata in B-flat minor. The whole room was plunged into the darkness of ten fluttering candles.

Following the lieutenant's eyes, Fabienne Hérault murmured:

"I have left behind the world and time. This house is in my image" It reminded Karim of Sister Andrée and her retreat into the shadows.

"What about the satellite dish?"

"I have to keep contact. I have to know when the truth will come out"

"It's on its way out right now, madame."

Without any change of expression, she nodded. The policeman had not been expecting this calm, smiling woman, with her comforting voice. He raised his gun and felt ashamed as he threatened her.

"Listen, lady," he panted. "I don't have much time. I need to see the photos of Judith, your daughter."

"The photos of…"

"Please. I've been looking for you for more than twenty hours. I've been reconstructing your story, and trying to understand. Why did you organise that scheme? Why did you obliterate the face of your child? For the moment, I'm sure of only two things. First, that Judith was no monster, as I first suspected. In fact, I reckon she was a real beauty. But the second fact is that her face somehow gave away the keys to a nightmare. A nightmare which, long ago, forced you to run away and which has just reawoken like a dormant volcano. So, show me the photos and tell me your story. I want dates, details, explanations, the lot! I want to know how and why a little girl who died fourteen years ago is now massacring people in a university town in the Alps!"

The woman remained motionless for a few seconds, then strode down a corridor with her giantess's gait. Clutching his gun, Karim followed her. Other rooms, other sheets, other colors. The house was a mixture of a morgue and a carnival.

At the far end of a small bedroom, Fabienne Hérault opened a wardrobe and removed a metal box. Karim stopped her hand, and opened it himself. Photographs. Just photographs.

The woman gave Karim a questioning look, then turned it over, making it shine in the light, as if she were plunging her hand into a stream of clear water. Finally, she lifted a photo up in front of him.

He could not help smiling.

A little girl was staring out at him, her dark face was oval, ringed with brown short-cropped curls. Bright blue eyes shone from beneath the shadows of her brows, emphasised by her long lashes, which were almost too luxuriant. That slightly masculine touch went with her slightly over-aggressive gaze.

Karim examined the picture. He felt as if he had known that face for a long time, a very long time, for ever.

But the miracle refused to happen. He had been hoping that her face would, somehow or other, reveal the path of truth to him. Fabienne whispered in her warm tones:

"It was taken a few days before she died. In Sarzac. She had short hair, we were…"

Karim looked up.

"That doesn't wash. This picture, her face, ought to tell me something. Act as a clue. All I can see is a pretty little girl."

"It's because this photograph is incomplete."

He started. The woman now handed him a second picture. "This is the last school photograph taken in Guernon, at Lamartine School, in CE2. Just before we left for Sarzac"

The cop examined the children's smiling faces. He spotted Judith, then grasped the unbelievable truth. He had been expecting this. It was the only possible explanation. But still he did not fully understand. He whispered:

"So Judith wasn't an only child?"

"Yes and no."

"Yes and no? What…what the hell's that supposed to mean? Explain yourself."

"I can't explain anything, young man. All I can do is tell you how something inexplicable destroyed my life."