Talking to Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

kind of thing. We had a scout about for the knife, but we didn’t find anything.”
    Vilar stared at the photograph the
brigadier
was holding, but the face smiling defiantly into the camera, chin slightly raised, no longer resembled the dead man. He gently pushed the hand away, got to his feet and took a small plastic bag from his pocket, into which the officer dropped the victim’s effects.
    â€œThere was someone with him, wasn’t there?”
    â€œSome friend from work. He’s in shock. Over there in the ambulance.”
    Vilar peeled off his gloves and walked over to the ambulance. He looked around for his partner, Laurent Pradeau, and saw him questioning a weeping girl. Two forensics officers from
l’Identité judiciaire
appeared, weighed down by their cases. As they shook hands, Vilarracked his brain to remember their names. He had worked with them before, particularly on the Dejean case in which a girl had been doused in petrol and burned alive right outside her house, by an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t bear the fact he had been dumped. Vilar could still picture the girl’s body slumped against a metal door, half her face bloated and contorted, the other half charred to the bone. He felt a chill run down his spine. He remembered the arrest, too, remembered hurtling down the stairs, gun in hand, chasing a lunatic with a sword. In the lobby of the building, the ex-boyfriend tripped over a pushchair and lay, still struggling, arms flailing, spewing obscenities about the dead girl; it had taken two or three well-placed kicks to persuade him to shut up and be still. Vilar had pistol-whipped him, breaking his nose, and would have pounded his skull against the floor if the other officers had not pulled him off. Vilar could still picture the suspect sprawled on the ground, his face covered in blood, sobbing convulsively like a small child. Even now he could felt a twinge of anger, felt his heart beat a little faster at the memory of that arsehole wallowing in self pity while a team of firemen gritted their teeth as they carried away the charred body of his girlfriend. He remembered the details so clearly, it was almost physically painful: the sweltering heat of that early June morning, the exact address where it had happened and yet the names of the two forensics officers at the scene were buried in some remote corner of his brain. It didn’t matter. Vilar handed the evidence bag to the younger of the two officers, who slipped the dead man’s possessions into his case and asked what the story was.
    Vilar sighed.
    â€œKnife attack. Multiple stab wounds. The guy probably died instantly, or pretty much. Heart or artery. I’m going to question the victim’s friend. The scene is contaminated, there’s been people trampling all over it; the only thing I can say for definite is that the body hasn’t been moved.”
    â€œRight, no surprise there. Assaults on a public roads are always shit. It’s not like we’re going to take samples of tarmac.”
    Vilar left them to deal with the body, climbed into the ambulanceand asked the paramedic comforting the witness to leave them. The man climbed down without a word and lit a cigarette. The dead man’s friend, who was still shivering spasmodically, had been wrapped in one of those foil survival blankets that shimmer in the midst of a catastrophe like a silver gown at a society ball. The man was about fifty with grey, receding hair cropped close. His shirt and trousers were smeared with blood. The man’s broad shoulders, stocky build and thick neck reminded Vilar of a rugby forward. He wondered just how tall the man was.
    â€œCommandant Vilar. I just have a few questions. Would that be O.K.?”
    The man nodded. He still had not looked up. Pradeau, who had followed Vilar into the ambulance, produced a wallet with a sigh. His face was drawn, his eyelids heavy. Vilar tried to meet his gaze, to see how he was