The Circle Read online

  BERNARD MINIER

  The Circle

  Translated by Alison Anderson

  Minotaur Books

  New York

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  The civilized people in the world, the ones who hide behind culture and art and politics … and even the law, they’re the ones to watch out for. They’ve got that perfect disguise goin’ for them, you know? But they’re the most vicious. They’re the most dangerous people on earth.

  Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Under French law, when it is believed that a crime has been committed, an officer of the crime unit will inform the district public prosecutor, who in turn appoints an examining magistrate to the case.

  Investigations are conducted under the supervision of these magistrates, who answer to the Ministry of Justice. Crimes may be investigated by police commissioners from the crime unit, along with commissioned officers of the gendarmerie. The gendarmerie, technically, is a branch of the armed forces, but it is in charge of public safety, performing police duties among the civilian population, and thus is often called upon to collaborate with various police units.

  Marsac is an imaginary town, but its institutions and inhabitants represent the academic crème de la crème, preparing students for the fiercely competitive entrance exams to the Grandes Écoles which, unlike regular universities in France, are selective and groom students to be the future leaders of the country.

  Prologue

  In the Tomb

  In her mind there was a cry, nothing more.

  A moan.

  A cry of despair, screaming with rage, pain, loneliness. Everything that, for months on end, had deprived her of her humanity.

  She was pleading, too.

  Please, oh please, have mercy, please … let me out of here, I beg you.

  In her mind, she was shouting and begging and weeping. But only in her mind: not a sound came from her throat. One fine day she awoke virtually mute. Mute … And she was someone who had always liked to talk. Words came so easily to her, words and laughter …

  In the darkness, she shifted her position to ease the tension in her muscles. She was sitting on the dirt floor with her back against the stone wall. Sometimes she would stretch out. Or go over to the flea-ridden mattress in the corner. She spent most of her time sleeping, curled up in a foetal position. When she stood up, she stretched or walked as best she could – four strides this way, four strides back, no more: her cell measured six feet each way. It was pleasantly warm; she had known for a long time that there must be a boiler room on the other side of the door, not only because of the heat but also the sounds: humming, clicking, hissing. She had no clothes on. Naked as a newborn babe. For months, maybe years. She relieved herself in a bucket and had two meals a day, except when he went away: then she might go several days alone without eating or drinking, and hunger, thirst and the fear of death bore into her. There were two holes in the door: one at the very bottom, through which he passed her meals, and another in the middle, which was for watching her. Even when they were closed the holes let in two faint rays of light that pierced the obscurity of the cell. Her eyes had grown accustomed to this half darkness and she could make out details that no one else would have seen.

  In the beginning she had explored her cage and listened out for the slightest sound. She had searched for a way to escape, a flaw in his system, the slightest little slackening on his part. Then she had stopped worrying about it. There was no flaw, no hope. She had lost track of how many weeks or months had gone by since her abduction. Since her life before. Roughly once a week, maybe more, maybe less, he ordered her to put her arm through the hole and he gave her an injection. It was painful, because he was clumsy and the liquid was thick. She lost consciousness almost at once and when she woke up she would find herself sitting in a dining room in a heavy high-backed armchair, her legs and torso bound to the chair. Washed, perfumed and dressed. Even her hair smelled good, of shampoo, and her breath, which must have been pestilential the rest of the time, smelled of toothpaste and peppermint. A fire burned brightly in the hearth, there were lit candles on the dark wooden table which shone like a lake and a delicious aroma rose from the plates. There was always classical music on the stereo. Like a conditioned animal, the moment she heard the music and saw the light from the flames and felt the clean clothes on her skin, her mouth began to water. Before he put her to sleep and removed her from her cell, he always made her go twenty-four hours without food.

  From the pain, however, she could tell he had abused her while she slept. In the beginning the thought had filled her with horror and when she awoke back in the cellar she had thrown up her first real meal. Now it no longer affected her. Sometimes he didn’t say anything, sometimes he spoke incessantly, but she rarely listened to him: her brain was no longer used to following a conversation. The words music, symphony, orchestra constantly cropped up in his speech like a leitmotif, as did one name: Mahler.

  How long had she been locked up? There was neither day nor night in her tomb. Because that was what it was: a tomb. Deep down, she knew she would never get out alive. Any hope had abandoned her long ago.

  She remembered the simple, wonderful time when she was free. The last time she had laughed, had friends over, seen her parents; the smell of the barbecue in the summer, the evening light in the trees in the garden and her son’s eyes. Faces, laughter, games. She saw herself making love to one man in particular. She had thought it was just an ordinary life but in fact it was a miracle. Her regret that she had not appreciated it more fully grew greater by the day. She realised that even the moments of sorrow and pain had been nothing in comparison to the hell she was in now – this non-existence, buried in this non-place. Outside the world. She supposed that only a few feet of stone, cement and earth kept her from the real world, but at the same time, hundreds of doors, miles of corridors and fences could not have separated her further.

  One day real life and the real world had been there, so close. For some unknown reason he had been obliged to move her in a hurry. He had dressed her hastily, bound her wrists behind her back and put a canvas bag over her head. Then he made her climb up some steps and she was in the open air. The open air … She had almost lost her senses with the shock of it.

  When she felt the warm sun, and sensed the light through the bag, and breathed the damp smell of the earth and the fields, the perfume of the thickets in flower, and heard the chattering of birds, she had almost fainted. She had wept so profusely that the canvas bag was soaked.

  Then he had made her lie down on a metal surface and through the canvas she inhaled exhaust and diesel oil. Even though she couldn’t have cried out, he had stuffed her mouth with cotton then covered it with surgical tape as a precaution. He had also bound her wrists and ankles together so that she couldn’t kick the side of the van. She felt the vibration of the engine and the van began to bounce over uneven ground before it reached the road.
When he suddenly accelerated and she heard the rush of cars overtaking them, she realised they were on the motorway.

  The worst of it had been the tollbooth. She could hear voices, music, the sound of engines all around her, so near … just there, on the other side of the metal. And dozens of human beings. Women, men, children, only a few inches away! She could hear them. She was overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. They were laughing, talking, coming and going, alive and free. They had no idea of her presence, her slow death, her life as a slave. She had shaken her head until she was banging it against the metal and her nose bled onto the grimy floor.

  It was fine weather the day he moved her, she was almost certain that everything must be in bloom. Springtime. How many more seasons to come until he got tired of her, until she was defeated by madness, until he killed her? The sudden certainty came to her that her friends and family and the police had already given her up for dead: only one person on earth knew that she was still alive, and he was a demon, a snake, an incubus. She would never see the daylight again.

  Friday

  1

  Dolls

  And it was there, in the shady garden,

  The killer’s shadow in cold ambush,

  Shadow against shadow on the grass less green than

  Red with evening’s blood.

  In the trees, a nightingale

  Was challenging Marsyras and Apollo.

  Deeper down, an aviary of nests and

  Mistletoe berries

  In rustic setting …

  Oliver Winshaw stopped writing. Blinked. At the edge of his vision something had attracted – or rather distracted – his attention. Beyond the window. A flash of light, outside. Like a camera flash.

  The storm had broken over Marsac.

  That night, as on every other night, he was sitting at his desk. He was writing a poem. His study was on the first floor of the house he had bought with his wife in the southwest of France thirty years earlier; a room with panelled oak walls, almost entirely covered with books. Primarily British and American poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Burns, Swinburne, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, e.e. cummings, Pound …

  He knew he could never hold a candle to his personal idols, but he didn’t care.

  He had never shown his poetry to anyone. He was approaching the winter of his life, even autumn was behind him now. Very soon he would build a big fire in the garden and into it he would throw 150 black notebooks. All in all, more than 20,000 poems. A poem a day for fifty-seven years. Probably the best kept secret of his life. Even his second wife had not been allowed to read them.

  After all these years, he still wondered where he found his inspiration. When he looked back on his life, it was nothing but a long procession of days that always ended with a poem written in the evening in the peace of his study. He never went to bed until he had finished, sometimes at one or two o’clock in the morning, even back in the days when he had been working. He had never needed a great deal of sleep and his job was not physically demanding: English professor at the University of Marsac.

  Oliver Winshaw was about to turn ninety.

  He was a calm and elegant old man, known by all. When he settled in this picturesque little university town, he was immediately dubbed l’Anglais. This was before his compatriots had swooped down like a swarm of locusts onto everything in the region that possessed old stones to be restored, and the nickname became somewhat diluted. Now he was only one among hundreds of other Englishmen in the area. But with the economic crisis the English were heading for destinations that were more financially attractive, such as Croatia or Andalusia, and Oliver wondered whether he would live long enough to find himself once again the only Englishman in Marsac.

  In the lily pond

  The faceless shadow slides

  Slender dreary profile

  Like the knife’s keen sharpened edge.

  He paused once again.

  Music … He thought he could hear music above the regular patter of rain and the endless echoing of thunder across the sky. Obviously it couldn’t be Christine, she had been asleep for a long while. Yes, it was coming from outside: classical music.

  Oliver grimaced in disapproval. They must have the volume on full blast for him to hear it in his study despite the storm and the closed window. He tried to concentrate on his poem, but there was nothing for it: bloody music!

  Annoyed, he looked again at the window. A lightning glow came through the blinds, and he could see the rain streaming down. The storm seemed to be concentrating its fury on this small town, cutting it off from the rest of the world.

  He pushed his chair back and stood up.

  He went over to the window and cracked open the blinds. The central drain was spilling over onto the cobblestones. Above the rooftops, the night was streaked with thin bolts of lightning, as if inscribed with the trace of a luminescent seismograph.

  In the house across the street all the lights were on. Perhaps they were having a party? The house in question, a townhouse with a garden to one side, was protected from the street and outside observers by a high wall. A single woman lived there; she was a professor at the lycée in Marsac, the most prestigious prep school in the region. A good-looking woman, with brown hair and an elegant figure, in the prime of her thirties. From time to time Oliver spied on her discreetly when she sunbathed in her deck chair, sheltered from all eyes – except his, because her garden was visible from his study window. There was something wrong. All the lights on every floor of the four-storey house were lit. And the front door was wide open, a little lantern clearly guiding the way to the threshold.

  But he couldn’t see anyone in the windows.

  At the side of the house, the French windows were wide open, banging in the wind, and the rain was driving at such an angle that it must be flooding the floor inside. Oliver could see it splashing on the tiles on the terrace and crushing the lawn.

  That was probably where the music was coming from. He felt his pulse quicken. He looked slowly over towards the swimming pool.

  Thirty feet by twenty. Sand-coloured tiles all around. A diving board.

  He felt a sort of dark excitement, the kind that grabs you when something unusual has just interrupted your daily routine. And at his age, routine made up his entire life. His gaze travelled all around the swimming pool. At the end of the garden the forest of Marsac began, 2,700 hectares of woods and paths. There was no barrier on that side, not even a chain-link fence, just a compact wall of vegetation.

  Oliver focused his attention on the pool. The surface seemed to be dancing slightly. He narrowed his gaze. First of all, he wondered what he was seeing. Then he realised that several dolls were bobbing on the water. Yes, that’s what it was … Even though he knew it was only dolls, he felt an inexplicable shiver go through him. They were floating next to each other, their pale dresses rippling on the rain-battered surface. Oliver and his wife had been invited for coffee once by their neighbour from across the street. His wife had been a psychologist before she retired, and she had a theory about the profusion of dolls in the home of a single woman in her thirties. When they got home she explained to her husband that their neighbour was probably a ‘woman-child’, and Oliver had asked her what she meant. She had gone on to use expressions such as ‘immature’, ‘evading responsibility’, ‘thinking only of her own pleasure’, ‘undergone an emotional trauma’, and Oliver had beaten a hasty retreat from the conversation: he had always preferred poets to psychologists. But he was damned if he could fathom why there were dolls in the swimming pool.

  I ought to ring the gendarmes, he thought. And tell them what? That there are dolls floating in a swimming pool? But it wasn’t normal. The house all lit up, no one in sight, and those dolls – where was the owner?

  He opened the window. A wave of humidity came into the room. The rain beat against his face, he blinked at the strange gathering of plastic faces, with their staring eyes.

  He could hea
r the music perfectly now. It was familiar, although it wasn’t Mozart, his favourite composer.

  Dammit, what the hell was going on!

  A bolt of lightning severed the darkness, immediately followed by a deafening clap of thunder. The noise made the windowpanes vibrate. Like a blinding light from a projector, the lightning showed that someone was there. Someone sitting at the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the water, and Oliver hadn’t noticed him because he was swallowed by the shadow of the tall tree in the middle of the garden. A young man … Bent over the floating tide of dolls, gazing at them. Although he was nearly fifty feet away, Oliver could make out the lost, frantic expression in the young man’s eyes, and his gaping mouth.

  Oliver Winshaw’s chest was an echo chamber, his heart pounding like a demonic percussionist. What was going on here? He rushed over to the telephone and took the receiver from its cradle.

  2

  World Cup

  ‘Anelka is a loser,’ said Pujol.

  Vincent Espérandieu looked at his colleague and wondered whether his opinion was based on the striker’s poor performance, or on his origins and the fact he came from a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. Pujol had no fondness for council estates, and even less for their inhabitants.

  For once, however, Espérandieu had to admit that Pujol was right: Anelka was useless. Worthless. Hopeless. Like the rest of the team, as it happened. This first match was a heartbreaker. Only Martin seemed not to care. Espérandieu looked over at him and smiled: he was sure his boss didn’t even know the name of the manager whom all of France despised and who had been called every name in the book.

  ‘Domenech is one fucking coward,’ said Pujol, as if he had been reading Vincent’s thoughts. ‘If we made it into the final in 2006, it’s because Zidane and the rest of the team took over.’