The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

Seven

GORSKI REGRETTED BRINGING HIS RAINCOAT. It was a warm, sunny day with no prospect of rain. He paused in the doorway of the Restaurant de la Cloche and lit a cigarette, his coat draped over the crook of his left arm. He walked along Rue de Hunigue until he reached the intersection. The police station was located a few minutes’ walk along Rue de Mulhouse, but Gorski had no desire to return there. Instead he crossed the street and continued along Avenue Charles de Gaulle. Most of the shops were closed for lunch and the streets were quiet. Gorski liked this part of the day. It was as if the town paused to draw breath for a moment, not that the pace of life in Saint-Louis demanded such a lull. Even so, Gorski strode along purposefully, as if to give the appearance that he was on his way to an important appointment.

He turned into a narrow side street where, a little further on, there was an inconspicuous bar called Le Pot. The name of the bar was painted in brown Germanic lettering above the door. A dark red Bar/Tabac sign was fixed to the wall with a rusting metal bracket. At night the sign was lit up, but during the day it would be quite possible to pass along Rue des Vosges without noticing there was a bar there at all. There were no windows save for two narrow oblongs of glass above eye level, which were for the purposes of ventilation only. The door was glass, but it was so plastered with posters advertising lottery tickets and various brands of cigarettes that it was impossible to see inside. The proprietor was aware that his bar was not particularly inviting, but the fact that, once inside, one could not be seen from the street, constituted a large part of its appeal.

Inside, the bar consisted of one small square room. The walls were painted with a dark mustard wash and decorated with faded prints depicting scenes from Old Alsace. Around two walls was a maroon banquette, the vinyl of which was cracked and worn. In one or two places, foam stuffing spilled out. In front of the banquette, five metal tables were bolted to the floor. In addition, four wooden tables were arranged in the centre of the room.

Gorski took a seat on the banquette and indicated to the proprietor with a little mime that he would take a pression. The bar occupied the wall opposite the door. On the right of this was the tabac area from which cigarettes, smoking paraphernalia and lottery tickets were sold. These two areas of the bar were separated by the wooden flap through which the proprietor accessed the bar. There were three beer taps, offering biere d’Alsace, a German weißbier and a dark ale. On the left of the bar was a stainless steel water bath, used to heat the hotdogs which were the only food served in Le Pot. The boiler was never turned off and it was from this that the bar got its characteristic aroma. The proprietor kept the lighting low, so that it was usually hard to tell whether it was day or night. In the late afternoon, however, if the sun was shining, two shafts of light penetrated the high windows and panned across the bar like the beams of a slow searchlight.

There were three other customers in the bar. A man in a shabby suit sat on the banquette beneath the high windows reading a newspaper, a glass of white wine on the table in front of him. He looked vaguely familiar. This was a common occurrence for Gorski. His work brought him into fleeting contact with a great number of people and in a small town like Saint-Louis it was inevitable that he ran into them again. His predecessor, Ribéry, had been blessed with total recall of the names and faces of people he met, but Gorski possessed no such a talent. Still, it bothered him that he could not remember who the man was.

Two men in workmen’s overalls stood at the bar. One of them looked at Gorski as he settled himself at his table. He probably recognised him. The previous day he had held a press conference at which he had given out the description of the young man seen on the scooter with Adèle. Gorski had been at pains to stress that the young man was sought only as a witness, but the papers had naturally chosen to cast the development in the most lurid light. Gorski’s picture had appeared next to the story in L’Alsace and in several other papers. He nodded a greeting in the direction of the man at the bar, who immediately looked away.

The proprietor brought his beer. He was a short, swarthy man with the build of an ex-boxer. He had small beady eyes and a slack, unattractive mouth. Gorski had overheard regulars address him as Yves, but he never greeted him by name. Similarly, although he must have recognised him, the proprietor did not show any sign of knowing Gorski. That was his way. Some bars fostered an atmosphere of conviviality. Le Pot was not one of them. If you made a remark to the proprietor, he would pass the time of day, but otherwise customers were left to themselves.

As Yves set his beer in front of him, Gorski asked him for a hotdog. Before he made his way back to the bar, he made a tour of the tables, wiping each of them down in the same unhurried manner. Gorski sipped his beer. It was pleasingly cold and crisp. His hotdog arrived on a paper plate. The meat was pink and flabby and disintegrated unpleasantly as soon as he put it in his mouth. He thought of Manfred Baumann tucking into his pot-au-feu or whatever it was he had been eating.

His talk with Baumann had gone pretty much as he had anticipated. If he was lying, he was hardly likely to admit to the fact unless confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Gorski was used to being lied to. People lied as matter of course and even when their lies were shown to be implausible, they were stubborn. Gorski understood the mechanism well. If, for example, his wife was to later ask him how he had spent his afternoon, he would, of course, omit any mention of his visit to this bar. What interested him was not so much the fact that someone lied, but how they behaved when they did so. Often people would reach for their cigarettes or became suddenly distracted by some irrelevant activity. They became incapable of maintaining eye contact. Women toyed with their hair. Men fingered their beards or moustaches. Gorski liked to question people in their everyday surroundings. Once a person had been dragged to the police station they were already disoriented and it became harder to discern whether their behaviour should be attributed to their unfamiliar surroundings or to the fact that they were trying to hide something. Gorski recalled that when he had visited Baumann at his apartment, he had, despite being initially reluctant to invite him inside, offered him coffee. It was a typical gesture — at once overcompensating for his previous hostility and attempting to postpone the start of the interview. Even at that point, when he had no way of knowing what Gorski’s visit was about, Baumann had behaved in a way that suggested he was uncomfortable.

Often, when confronted with their lies, people feigned indignation. How many times Gorski had heard the phrases This is outrageous! and How dare you! or been idly threatened with legal action. He took such outbursts, if not as a sign of guilt, at least as an indication that the person in question had something to hide. Something perhaps completely unrelated to the object of his enquiry, but something nonetheless. Manfred Baumann had not done this. He was, Gorski suspected, too meek an individual for such a course of action. Neither had his demeanour betrayed much of his inner thoughts. He struck Gorski as the type who, for whatever reason, was accustomed to keeping a lid on things. He was repressed.

On the other hand, the possibility that Baumann had not seen anything could not be entirely dismissed. People were unobservant, especially when going about their daily routines. They walked or drove to and from work, sat in the same offices and cafés every day without giving the least thought to their surroundings. Often, when questioned, people were unable to describe the furniture or decor of places they visited regularly. Still, Manfred Baumann intrigued him. Whether he was lying or not, there was something in his manner that piqued Gorski’s curiosity. He was at once evasive and obsequious, as if he wanted to be liked or at least approved of.

Nevertheless, it was a measure of how poorly the case was progressing that Gorski was spending so much time thinking about Baumann, who had, in all likelihood, nothing whatsoever to do with the girl’s disappearance. The case was of the worst sort. It was not even clear whether a crime had been committed. Yet the disappearance of a young woman always garnered press attention and the police were obliged to investigate, or at least be seen to investigate. Had it been a middle-aged man who had disappeared, someone like Manfred Baumann, for example, the case would not even make the ‘In Brief’ section of L’Alsace.

Thus far, Gorski had been unable to form more than a rudimentary picture of the young woman whose disappearance he was investigating. Adèle Bedeau’s mother had died some years before and her birth certificate recorded no father’s name. Mme Pasteur was fond of her and plainly harboured maternal feelings towards the girl, but Adèle had revealed little to her employer. She was a good worker, punctual and polite, but little more. It did not seem to matter to her whether she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, chopping onions or waiting tables. She carried out whatever task she was allotted with the same world-weary air. Marie Pasteur described her as diligent. It seemed to Gorski that she was resigned. She simply didn’t care what she did. Her relations with her employers and the patrons of the Restaurant de la Cloche were cordial enough, but she did not ask questions, talk about herself or joke around with the other employees. She was entirely self-contained. And outside work, Gorski had discovered little more. The tiny furnished apartment she rented in a building on Rue de Jura could barely have revealed less. She paid her rent on time and her neighbours had little to say about her.

Gorski had gone through her rooms feeling, as he always did on such occasions, like an intruder. The apartment consisted of a single bed-sitting room with an adjoining kitchenette and a tiny shower room. It was early on Saturday afternoon when Gorski had gained access. There was no concierge in the building and the landlady, whose name he had forgotten, leaned on the door jamb, her arms folded under her large bosom, a bored expression on her face. She was a squat woman with dyed hair and thick plastic-framed glasses. The venetian blind was lowered and Gorski had the impression that it was seldom raised. The air was stale. Gorski felt uncomfortable under the landlady’s gaze. He disliked being scrutinised going about his work, especially so when it involved going through the personal effects of a young female.

He went into the kitchen and opened the doors of the cabinets. There were a few mismatched items of crockery, glasses, some tinned food. The fridge was empty, save for some fruit yoghurts in plastic containers, a pat of butter and a jar of strawberry preserve. On the worktop there was a packet of loose tea and a wooden board with a half-eaten loaf in brown paper bag from a nearby bakery. Gorski picked up the bag of tea and smelt it. There was a single cup and a side plate with a few crumbs, unwashed in the sink. Gorski did not read much into the lack of comestibles. Most likely Adèle took most of her meals at the Restaurant de la Cloche. He flicked open his notebook and found the name of the landlady, before stepping back into the sitting room.

The room was furnished with a sofa-bed that had been neatly stored away, an ugly glass-topped coffee table, a small chest of drawers and an old-fashioned wardrobe, too large for the room, which Gorski imagined was a hand-me-down from the landlady’s house.

‘There’s no need for you to stay, Mme Huber,’ he said.

The landlady did not appear to understand that he wished her to leave.

‘When will I be able to move her things out?’ she said. ‘I can’t afford to let the place go unlet.’

The girl had been gone for a matter of thirty-six hours. Gorski stared at her.

‘There’s no reason to believe that your tenant will not return,’ he said. ‘However, for the time being, the apartment is under police jurisdiction.’

He deliberately avoided using the term ‘crime scene’. People tended to get over-excited when they heard this phrase. And in any case, the apartment was not technically the scene of any crime.

Mme Huber looked at him sceptically. ‘What about the rent?’

‘I assume you’ve have been paid till the end of the month.’

She nodded grudgingly.

‘That’s three weeks away,’ said Gorski. ‘Let’s assume for the time being that the matter will be sorted out by then.’

The woman shrugged. Gorski asked her for the key and she handed it over without a word, before allowing him to usher her out of the apartment. When she was gone, he sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. He looked around the room for some sign of Adèle Bedeau. There were no pictures on the wall, no photographs on the bedside table, no books or magazines. Adèle had lived there for almost a year and seemingly done nothing to make the space more homely. Aside from the mismatched furniture, he might have been in a hotel room. Gorski got up and went to the window. He raised the blind to reveal an aspect of wasteland and the back of the breaker’s yard on Rue de la Paix.

Gorski made a cursory examination of the wardrobe and chest of drawers. He had no wish to fumble through the girl’s underwear or other garments and, even alone, he felt embarrassed doing so. There was nothing to suggest a hasty departure, nothing that suggested the absence of things. It was something his mentor, Ribéry, had taught him — not just to look at what was there, but to look for things that should have been there but weren’t. Adèle’s toothbrush was in the bathroom, along with other bottles and potions Gorski was familiar with from his own wife and daughter. On top of the wardrobe was a battered suitcase. Gorski lifted it down and placed it on the coffee table. It was dusty. It was the sort of place where a girl might keep her private bits and pieces. He flicked open the brass clasps. The case was empty. Adèle, it seemed, was a girl with no secrets. He put the suitcase back in its place. In the bedside table drawer, he found a half-finished tab of contraceptive pills. That was something. The last pill that had been taken was Thursday’s, suggesting that she had not returned home since then. Of course, it was possible Adèle was the absent-minded type, but if she had chosen to disappear, she had certainly not done so in a premeditated manner.

Afterwards, Gorski knocked on the doors of the neighbouring apartments. No one had ever done more than greet Adèle in passing. They had never seen her bring anyone back to the apartment or heard voices from inside.

‘Is she in some sort of trouble?’ a grey-haired woman, two doors along the landing, had asked.

People often asked this, their glee poorly disguised as concern. Gorski had no doubt the old woman would be quite delighted to be told that her neighbour had been brutally raped and done to death.

Gorski’s train of thought was interrupted by Yves taking a fresh glass of wine to the man in the shabby suit. The workmen who had been standing by the bar had gone, but he had not even noticed them leave. Perhaps it was not so unlikely that Manfred Baumann had seen nothing on the night of Adèle’s disappearance.

As Yves placed the glass on the man’s table, he looked up from his newspaper and caught Gorski’s eye. He pretended that it had not happened and immediately lowered his gaze. Gorski remembered him. He was a schoolteacher who had left the profession after a male pupil made some unsavoury allegations. Gorski had conducted a cursory investigation, but the pupil’s claims had proved malicious. Nevertheless, as happens in such cases, a cloud hangs over the accused and the man resigned his position. Gorski would have liked to convey with a cordial look that he did not regard him as guilty, but the former teacher had not given him the opportunity to do so. Most likely, the man did not wish to be reminded of an unpleasant episode in his past.

Gorski ordered a second beer. Yves brought it over and wordlessly removed his paper plate and napkin. The man finished his drink and left without looking in Gorski’s direction. Now that the bar was empty, Gorski felt vaguely ridiculous. The proprietor studiedly busied himself polishing glasses and wiping down the surfaces behind the bar. There was a telephone on the wall next to the door to the WC. Gorski thought of phoning the station to check on the progress of the investigation, but it would be impossible to do so without being overheard. There was nothing else for it but to return to the station. He drank his beer, paid at the counter and left.

He passed the rest of the afternoon in his office, typing a report on the investigation for the examining magistrate. Why, even in this official document, did he feel the need to present matters in a positive light? The men he had despatched to question residents in the area about further sightings of Adèle or the young man on the scooter, had not turned up anything. It was frustrating. Having dismissed the idea that the waitress had disappeared of her own accord, Gorski was left with three further possibilities: she had met with an accident, committed suicide, or she had been murdered. The first of these could also be dismissed. Nobody answering Adèle’s description had been admitted to a hospital in the vicinity of Saint-Louis and if she had met with a fatal accident, her body would have been discovered by this time. Suicide could not be entirely dismissed. Had she thrown herself into the Rhine — the preferred method of suicide in the area — it was possible that her body would not be recovered for days or even weeks. However, nothing in her behaviour leading up to her disappearance suggested that she intended to do away with herself. Which left homicide, but without a body there could be no murder investigation. It was all speculation and Gorski did not like speculation. He liked to proceed with solid, logical steps built on concrete evidence. In his twenty or so years as a detective he had trained himself to extend the same attention to whatever scraps of information were connected to a case, no matter how insignificant they might appear. His credo was to eliminate intuition, what his colleagues liked to call ‘hunches’. And for the time being there was only one lead, the boy on a scooter. Until the young man was identified or Adèle’s body was discovered, there was little chance of progressing the investigation. Already, Gorski had the familiar sinking feeling in his stomach that the case was going cold.

At half past six he went home, resisting the temptation to stop off in a bar on the way. At seven o’clock Gorski’s wife, Céline, placed a dish of baked fish and potatoes on the table. Gorski uncorked the bottle of wine they had opened the previous evening and poured each of them a glass. His daughter, Clémence, was seated at the table, a paperback flattened on her dinner plate. She was sixteen and had inherited her mother’s fine features and chestnut hair. She had retained a boyish figure, something Gorski found unaccountably reassuring. Clémence closed her book and pushed her glass forward. Gorski poured the remains of the wine into it.

Céline dished out the food. There was barely enough to go around. She was not much of a cook. Gorski sometimes wondered if her frugal helpings accounted for Clémence’s lack of physical development. Céline herself was half a head taller than Gorski, willowy, with small breasts and slim hips. It was a miracle she had ever borne a child and, after Clémence, she had sworn it was not an experience she intended to repeat.

Gorski rarely spoke about his work with Céline, and especially not over the dinner table, but the disappearance of Adèle Bedeau was big news. Clémence was fascinated, but Gorski had nothing new to tell her. ‘Without a body, it’s all in limbo,’ he said.

He took a mouthful of fish. It was tasteless. Céline refused to have salt in the kitchen, maintaining that it was nothing more than a road to high blood pressure.

Clémence looked disappointed. ‘But you still think she was murdered?’

Gorski shrugged. ‘People disappear all the time.’

He picked a fishbone from between his teeth and placed it on the edge of his plate.

‘I think she was murdered,’ said Clémence. She ignored a look from her mother.

‘What about the motive?’ he asked.

‘A crime of passion, of course. Most murders are committed by a person known to the victim.’

‘That’s true,’ said Gorski. He enjoyed playing along with Clémence’s theories. ‘But if that were the case, where’s the body? It’s unlikely that a murder committed in the heat of the moment could be covered up.’

‘I think it was the fat butcher on Avenue de Bâle. He killed her, chopped her up and put her in his sausages.’

Céline finally intervened. ‘Can’t we discuss something more suitable for the dinner table?’

Gorski and Clémence exchanged a conspiratorial look. The rest of the meal was passed in silence.

Céline ran a fashion boutique in town. The shop had never done better than break even. The stock was too upmarket for Saint-Louis, but Céline insisted that the women of the town needed to be educated. In spring and autumn she held a reception to present her latest collection, as she liked to call it. She hired models, served champagne and canapés and invited what great-and-good Saint-Louis had to offer. Céline insisted that Gorski attend these gatherings. She encouraged the ladies to bring their husbands, since, she maintained, it would be they who would be opening their chequebooks at the end of the evening. Gorski spent these evenings with the other reluctant husbands loitering close to the table where the drinks were served. These occasions were less about the success of Céline’s business, than establishing ‘the Gorskis’ as part of the Good Society of the town. Céline made no attempt to conceal her belief that her husband’s job was an impediment to such status. When they were first married, she had encouraged him to give up the police to study law. After his promotion to inspector her aspiration switched to moving to a proper town, perhaps even Paris — somewhere her business could thrive and where she could mix in what she called ‘sympathetic society’. But, Gorski explained, it wasn’t easy for a provincial cop to get a move to a big city. Once, he had put in for a transfer to Strasbourg, but when it was turned down he did not pursue it. Gorski sympathised with his wife’s desire to move to somewhere less dreary than Saint-Louis, but over the years he had convinced himself that it was not viable. It was not that he had grown fonder of Saint-Louis. The truth was that he was privately convinced that he had found his level.