Free Alex by Pierre Lemaitre Page A

– in fact he seemed angry. He had obviously said more than he intended.
    That time, she hadn’t touched the dog food – he had added more to what was left over – but she took the bottle of water and is saving it. She wanted to think about what he had said, but when you are in such pain it’s impossible to think about anything else.
    She spends hours with her arms tensed above her head, her hand gripping, stroking the huge knot in the rope holding up the cage. A knot as big as her fist, incredibly tight.
    Over the course of the next night, Alex slipped into a sort of coma. Her mind could not focus on anything. She felt as though her muscle mass had wasted away, that she was nothing but bone, a singular contraction, a vast spasm from head to foot. Up until then, she had been able to stick to a regimen of infinitesimal exercises she repeated every hour or so. Wiggling her toes, moving her feet, then her ankles, turning them three times one way then three times the other, moving up, tensing one calf and relaxing it, tensing it again, then the other calf, stretching her right leg as far as it will go, drawing it back, and again, three times, etc.
    But now she no longer knows whether she dreamed the exercises or whether she actually did them. What has woken her is her moaning. At first it sounded as if it was someone else, some voice outside her. Little groaning sounds from deep in her belly, sounds she has never heard before.
    And though now wide awake, she could not stop these moans that come in time to the rhythm of her breathing.
    Alex realises something. She has started to die.

10
    Four days. Four days the investigation has been going nowhere. Forensics have turned up nothing, the witness statements have led nowhere. Somewhere someone had spotted the white van, somewhere else the van was blue. Somewhere else again, someone reported a woman, their neighbour, missing; they phone her – she’s at work. Another woman being investigated is already on her way home from her sister’s; her husband didn’t even know she had a sister … it’s a nightmare.
    The procureur has appointed an investigating magistrate: a young, dynamic guy from a generation that likes things hot and heavy. The media have scarcely published the story – it was mentioned in the news in brief and immediately submerged by the daily wave of rolling news. All in all, they’re no closer to identifying the kidnapper and they still don’t know the name of the victim. Every reported missing person has been checked and none could be the woman on the rue Falguière. Louis has widened the search area to include the whole of Paris, checked into missing persons reports filed several days earlier, then several weeks, finally several months, but nothing; nothing that tallies with the description of a young, pretty girl whose route might have taken her along the rue Falguière in the fifteenth arrondissement.
    “So we’re saying no-one knows this girl? She hasn’t been seen for four days and no-one out there is worried?”
    It’s almost 10.00 p.m.
    The three of them are sitting on a bench, staring at the canal, a neat little row of officers. Camille has left the intern to man the office and taken Armand and Louis out to dinner. When it comes to restaurants, he has no imagination and no memory; trying to remember an address is like pulling teeth. There’s no point asking Armand – he hasn’t been to a restaurant since the last time someone else offered to pay, which means the place has probably been closed for donkey’s years. As for Louis, anything he might recommend is well beyond Camille’s budget. For dinner, his idea of a simple little restaurant is Taillevent or Ledoyen. So Camille takes the decision. La Marine on the Quai de Valmy, more or less next door to his building.
    Time was, they had a lot to talk about. When they worked together, they quite often had dinner after clocking off. The rule was that Camille always paid. By his reckoning,