Free Talking to Ghosts by Hervé Le Corre, Frank Wynne

time.”
    â€œDon’t worry, it’s no problem.”
    She turned towards the boy and waved and smiled at him and still he lay on his side, his cheek resting on the clown’s head, staring up at the policeman.
    â€œEspecially as you’ve come to talk about Nadia, the poor thing.”
    â€œIt’s me who’s come at a bad time. I hoped to talk to her family and friends at the funeral, but no-one came, so I’ve been forced to come bothering people at home to ask them questions. Did you know Nadia well?”
    â€œWe got on O.K., but I wouldn’t say I knew her well. We had coffee sometimes, talked about our sons, about our problems … I wanted to come to the burial, sorry, I mean … she was cremated, wasn’t she? But I didn’t have the strength. I’m not good with that sort of thing.”
    â€œNo-one’s good with that sort of thing.”
    The woman sighed. She seemed to be thinking, searching for words.
    â€œI can’t stop thinking about Victor, the poor kid, he’s all alone now.”
    â€œDoesn’t he still have a grandfather? Nadia’s father.”
    Sandra shook her head.
    â€œI don’t think she’d seen him in years. He lives somewhere near Aixen-Provence, I think. That’s if he’s still alive …”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œNothing, I mean … He might be dead, I don’t know, she burned her bridges long ago. I don’t think she really saw him after she ran away from home in her teens. Can I ask you something?”
    She did not give Vilar time to reply.
    â€œHow did she die? What did he do to her?”
    â€œDo you really want to know?”
    Sandra blushed a bit, but held his gaze.
    â€œYes. It’s important to know if she suffered. We might not have been close, but we talked a lot, we talked about our troubles, she’d come round to mine for dinner or we’d go to hers. Victor and José got on well. So yes, I really want to know whether they hurt her, even if I know it doesn’t change anything.”
    Her eyes were glistening. She poured herself another coffee, her movements halting, almost trembling.
    â€œShe was beaten and then strangled.”
    Sandra de Melo nodded, sitting motionless, staring down at the cup in her hand. Vilar allowed her time to collect her thoughts, to imagine what Nadia must have suffered in her dying moments. When she raised her cup and sipped her coffee, he said gently:
    â€œA minute ago you said something about her running away from home … Can you tell me a bit more about that?”
    Sandra hesitated. She turned towards her son, who was crawling slowly towards the table, clutching his puppet.
    â€œYeah. She told me she left home when she was sixteen, that that’s when her life went all to hell. Before that, things had been going really well, she was good at school. A bit like me, I did O.K. at school, I actually liked it. I even managed to get my
baccalauréat
. Anyway, long story short … She’d been really close to her mother – I think she was a teacher.”
    â€œHer mother committed suicide, didn’t she? Was that after Nadia left home? Because you said she ran away, but it sounds like she was really leaving for good. You said yourself, ‘she left home’. ”
    â€œI don’t know. I couldn’t ask her. If I so much as mentioned her mother she’d end up crying. But her father, I don’t know, it was like she hated him.”
    Here was something interesting. The father was the only surviving member of the nuclear family. His daughter runs away, his wife commits suicide, and there he is, alone. What sort of state must he have been in? How does someone survive something like that? In hisnotebook, Vilar scrawled half a dozen circles around the word “father”. Nadia would have been a minor at the time. There would have been a missing person’s report. There might still be