Talking to Ghosts Read Online Free Page B

holding up, but Pradeau managed to avoid him.
    â€œHis papers,” Pradeau said, nodding towards the man. “There were two guys and a girl. We’ve got their descriptions. The guy with the knife was tall, skinhead, earring, wearing combat trousers. The other guy …”
    â€œWhat did the girl look like?” Vilar said, turning towards the witness who was shivering where he sat.
    â€œShort, skinny, dyed red hair, wearing a black leather miniskirt and a chunky pair of Nikes.”
    â€œAre you sure of the brand?”
    The man shook his head, screwed up his face.
    â€œUm … no, what I meant was big trainers, you know? With those thick soles.”
    â€œWhat did she do?”
    â€œShe tried to intervene, tried to calm them down, told her mates to quit it, said they were off their faces. She ran off when things got out of hand. She was long gone by the time they left, just after …” He fell silent and bit his lower lip. His eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand.
    Pradeau patted the man on the shoulder, shooting Vilar a look thatmight have been exhaustion or impatience, then quickly looked down at his pad, several pages of which were covered with scribbled notes.
    â€œThat confirms the witness statement I’ve got here: a girl coming out of the station heading to school, she saw the whole thing, though at first she didn’t realise what was happening. The other witnesses showed up a few minutes later when the victim was on the ground, all they saw was the two guys running away. We’ve got cars patrolling between here, Les Capucins and La Victoire, I radioed in a rough description.”
    Vilar nodded. Pradeau added that Darien, the deputy
procureur
, had just shown up and was dealing with the girl. Vilar scarcely heard, focused as he was on the man huddled beneath his foil blanket, slowly rolling between his hands the tissue he had used to wipe his eyes. He let it fall at his feet, then touched his neck gingerly with his fingertips as though afraid he had broken or dislocated something. Vilar leaned towards him.
    According to his papers his name was Michel Vanini, born 1961 in Sainte-Livrade. Married with two daughters aged twenty-four and seventeen.
    In a weary voice, hoarse from tiredness and probably too much drinking and smoking, Vanini explained that four of them had gone out on the town to celebrate the end of a job laying cables in the Quartier du Lac. He was the foreman. They had been supposed to head back to Agen that day, but had ended up partying at a club called the Black Jack until getting on for 3 a.m. After they left the club, the two others had gone home to bed but he and the dead man, Kevin, had decided party a little longer since this was Kevin’s stag night, he was supposed to be marrying a girl called Vanessa; Vanini was distraught at the thought of how she would react. Vilar tried to distract him, asking where they had gone after the club. Vanini said they had been to a peepshow – not the one the victim had been killed outside, but one a bit further down the street on the corner of the cours de la Marne, they had only gone in for a laugh, you know, nothing sleazy, they had been working their arses off for two weeks straight, with no time off to gohome to kiss the wife and kids, nothing but a breather on Sundays, but it had meant a lot of overtime and besides it was not as though they had a choice – their boss had been clear that they either took the job or they found work elsewhere, so yeah, they’d gone to chill out, there was no harm in that.
    The guy seemed to regain his confidence as he confided this, he looked up now, giving Vilar a defiant look that said hard-working labourers had a right to some downtime and searching the policeman’s vague, distant expression for that shrug of approval and support that men reserve for that kind of boys’ night out, probably thinking,
Hey, you know what