Bed of Nails by Varenne Antonin

Author:Varenne, Antonin [Varenne, Antonin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2012-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

11

A telephone call at eight in the morning. Guérin answered it and made a note. A hanging in the 12th arrondissement. An eighty-year-old widower, one of the most common statistics in suicide. He had sent Lambert. His deputy, still smarting from the dressing-down of the day before, had slunk off, his tail between his legs.

The videos had been no help. Possibly doctored, more probably just nothing. Guérin had called the witnesses named in his six files. He had managed to contact the concierge, the doctor and the theatre-goer. They could all remember the suicides, but they had forgotten the details. A blonde woman and two men, one with a beard: vanished into the arbitrary meandering of memory. The street vendor couldn’t be traced. Next, he called the refuge for the homeless to question Paco again. Guérin had kept his word, finding him a place at the centre, so that he could be examined and offered treatment, at least for a few days. But Paco had decamped overnight. Guérin spoke to the doctor who had seen him. He diagnosed double pneumonia, plus secondary infections, the kind of thing people pick up living rough: skin disease, parasites, early stages of cirrhosis. According to the doctor, Paco was not long for this world. A few months at most: as well as everything else, there were tumours everywhere, as big as fists, from the stomach to the lungs. The city had punched holes throughout the organism of the little Tunisian of uncertain age. He had slunk off to die alone in a hole somewhere, like sick animals do, without making a fuss or attracting an audience.

Guérin couldn’t get hold of the fingerprint files from his office. He had called the lab. Ménard was a rotten apple, but better not to talk to anyone else. And the technician was off sick for three days.

Everything was falling apart, the elements were becoming atomised. The yellow raincoat had got bigger, or else Guérin had shrunk. Churchill was sulking, as he slipped into depression. The apartment had become a mausoleum to the memory of his mother, watched over by a neurotic parrot. There were no more temper tantrums or cackles, only silence. Guérin had lost the thread. He simply saw a parallel between his own condition and that of the world: they were both chaotic, no need to imagine any conspiracy, just a complex mass alternating between hazardous free will and anarchic disintegration. In that steaming cauldron, anything might make sense. Believing gave a shape to your illusions. But faith had to be shared. Out there somewhere, it might be that three insane people were methodically killing others. Nobody was going to help him find them. All he had was one newspaper cutting and a bloodstain on the ceiling. And the Kowalski affair was bound to resurface: the Kowalski nightmare, rather. Absence of proof and lingering doubt. Doubt about Kowalski.

Guérin slipped the cutting into his pocket. In the corridor, he turned his back on the service stairs and walked resolutely towards the inner reaches of No.

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