Free Camille by Pierre Lemaitre

as far as possible from the terrace. I order another coffee.
    The woman involved in the incident is not dead. The parked car took most of the force of the blast. She was taken away in an ambulance.
    Time to head for the hospital. The casualty department. Before she’s discharged or transferred to another ward.
    But first, I need to reload. Seven cartridges in the Mossberg.
    The fireworks display is only just beginning.
    I’m planning to paint the walls red.
    *
    6.00 p.m.
    Despite his agitation, Camille cannot drum his fingers on the steering wheel. He drives a specially adapted car with centrally located controls – he has no alternative given that his arms are short and his feet dangle off the ground. And in a vehicle designed or adapted for handicapped persons, you have to be careful where you place your fingers on the steering wheel; one wrong move and the car could go off the road. To make matters worse, Camille is not particularly good with his hands; aside from artistic ability, he is downright clumsy.
    He pulls up outside the hospital and walks across the car park, mentally rehearsing what he plans to say to the doctor – the sort of pithy phrases you spend hours polishing only to forget as soon as the moment arrives. When he came here this morning, reception had been crowded so he had immediately gone up to Anne’s room. This time he stops. The desk is at eye level (about one metre forty, Camille estimates). He goes around and, without a second thought, pushes open the door marked “ AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. NO ENTRY ”.
    “What the hell?” the receptionist yells. “Can’t you read?”
    “Can’t you ?” Camille retorts, holding out his warrant card.
    The woman bursts out laughing and give him a thumbs-up.
    “Good one!”
    She is a slim black woman of about forty, sharp-eyed, with a flat chest and bony shoulders. From the Antilles. Her name-tag reads “ OPHÉLIA ”. She is wearing an ugly frilly blouse, a pair of huge, white movie-star glasses shaped like butterfly wings and she stinks of cigarettes. She holds up a fleshy hand telling Camille to wait a moment while she answers the phone, patches the call through, hangs up, then turns and looks at him admiringly.
    “Well, ain’t you a little thing? For a policeman, I mean . . . Don’t they have some kind of height requirement?”
    Though Camille is in no mood to deal with this, the woman makes him smile.
    “I got a special dispensation,” he says.
    “You got someone to pull some strings, is what you did!”
    Within five minutes, their banter has become a friendly conversation. She seems unfazed by the fact that he is a police officer. Camille cuts it short and asks to speak to the consultant dealing with Anne Forestier.
    “At this time of night, you’d need to talk to the on-call doctor up on the ward.”
    Camille nods and heads towards the lifts, only to come back again.
    “Were there any phone calls for her?”
    “Not that I know . . .”
    “You sure?”
    “Take my word for it. It’s not like the patients in that wing are up to taking calls.”
    Camille walks away again.
    “Hey, hey!”
    The woman is fluttering a sheet of yellow paper, as though fanning someone taller than her. Camille traipses back to the desk. Ophélia gives him a smouldering look.
    “A little love letter from me to you . . .”
    It is a bureaucratic form. Camille stuffs it into his pocket, takes the lift up to the intensive care unit and asks to see the registrar. He will have to wait.
    *
    The car park outside A. & E. is full to bursting. It’s the perfect place to hide in plain sight: as long as you don’t park here for too long, no-one is going to notice one more car. All you have to do is be alert, discreet. Ready to act.
    It helps if you have a loaded Mossberg under a newspaper on the passenger seat. Just in case.
    Now all I need to do is think; plan for the future.
    One option is just to wait until the woman is being transferred from the hospital. Probably