Talking to Ghosts Read Online Free

rephrased them, weighing them down with superfluous words and convoluted phrases, interwoven with unspoken warnings, coughs and conciliatory gestures. Victor watched the man’s hands, like strange animals, puppets vainly waved about in order to distract him, but when at last the policeman fell silent, slightly out of breath, the boy said nothing, only let this invisible clock, humid and halting, mark out the time.
    So the policeman reeled off the questions once more, in a low voice rephrasing them, leaning over the boy like a priest taking confession.
    A quarter of an hour later the doctor came back, still smiling, and found herself mired in this oppressive rhythm of murmured questions that went unanswered, and that was more uncomfortable than if noone had spoken at all. After a short while, in the same low voice, she suggested to the policeman that he stop the questioning now because the boy was tired. Reluctantly, Vilar got to his feet and said goodbye. He held out his hand to Victor and, lifting a skinny arm, the boy shook it, his hand as limp as a spray of withered flowers.

2
    The body lay huddled at the foot of a wall, the head resting on an arm, as though asleep. It had fallen in front of a sex shop whose brash neon colours turned the faces all around into shifting, sickly masks. The dead man had his back to the police, to the onlookers, to the cars that passed, slowing in the glare of the strobing blue lights, to the pool of blood trickling across the sloping pavement into the gutter which reflected the seedy, squalid lighting. The body had not yet been covered and, under the jacket and the rucked up T-shirt, the pale skin of the man’s lower back was visible. On the far side of the street passers-by hurrying towards the nearby train station lugging heavy bags and suitcases craned their heads, hoping for a glimpse of something in the scrum of police cars and the uniformed officers patrolling the crime scene.
    Vilar pulled on a pair of latex gloves and crouched down in order to make out the man’s features, examine the wounds and determine cause of death. He noted a shallow gash below the right ear a few millimetres wide, which had not bled significantly. Lifting away the front of the stained denim jacket, he could see only a black Johnny Hallyday T-shirt, slashed in three places across the chest and soaked in blood that had already begun to clot. There was a stab wound to the left of the sternum. Vilar moved a latex-gloved finger tentatively over the gash, then withdrew it with a sigh.
    The face was that of a man of maybe twenty-five. Short dark brown hair. Three days’ stubble. Delicate features. As he always did whenhe examined a body, Vilar watched intently for several seconds – motionless, holding his breath – for some shudder that might indicate that the victim was not quite dead, that there was yet something to be done, but of course nothing happened. Once again he cursed the illogical stubbornness that made him EJECT the evidence of his own eyes, the refusal to accept the inevitable that, some years earlier in a morgue, had made him scream at the pathologist to stop just as he was about to make an incision because he thought he noticed the pale fingers trembling on the stainless steel table. The pathologist had not seemed surprised and – out of kindness or pity – had smiled and explained that it sometimes happened to him too.
    Vilar was the sort of man who did not resign himself to death, who felt that it could be conquered, could be eliminated. By force of will, through memory, or by summoning ghosts.
    â€œKevin Labrousse, born 8 July, 1979 in Villeneuve-sur-Lot,” a voice above his head said.
    An officer from the
brigade anti-criminalité
who had been first on the scene was waving a wallet and a plastic I.D. card.
    â€œSomeone found it on the street, not far away. There’s some cash, forty euros, and a couple of photos, social security card, bank card, that