Chapter 4
20 October
You’re picking up where you left off.
“'On Sunday 8 November, between approximately two and four in the afternoon, a woman remained on the pavement opposite the complainant's home.'”
Captain Wattez reads without looking up. She has a paper cup of coffee in her left hand and the sheet in her right, and she reads fast, with a slight northern accent that rounds off the ends of her words.
“'Head partially shaved, red woolly hat. During this period the complainant received eleven calls from an unknown number, which he did not answer. He states that he fears for the safety of his wife and son.'”
She puts the sheet down on the desk. At last she looks at me.
“Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Eleven times.”
“I counted too. Yesterday afternoon, on the pavement across the road, with the flip phone to my ear. He didn't pick up once.”
She doesn't like my answer.
Her office is on the second floor. Two desks facing each other, a dead plant in a giant yoghurt pot, a radiator that knocks like someone trying to get in. Through the window, the car park, and the clear, cold sky of a Monday at three degrees.
Last night at eight, the flip phone rang in my hotel room. A woman's voice, in a hurry: “Captain Wattez. Tomorrow, nine o'clock. Ask at the front desk.” She had my number because it's in Grégoire's incident report.
So he did that. He picked up his phone, he copied down my number, he went to the police station, and he reported me.
I'm wearing jeans that are too short and a bottle-green jumper, handed to me at eight this morning by a charity clothes bank near the station. The red hat I bought yesterday at Wazemmes market, three euros, with the social worker's money. I don't take it off. I don't want her looking at my scar while I talk.
“Do you know what that's called, what you did on Sunday?” she says. “For a start, it's harassment. Next time it'll be a complaint, and there'll be nothing I can do for you.”
“It's my son in that house.”
“So you say.”
She opens a spiral notebook. Her nails are bitten short, right down to the skin.
“What I've got is a file. Yours, if you really are the woman from the towpath. I've had it since 17 October. It says: woman found unconscious, half in the water, wound to the back of the skull. Fall or blow. The forensic pathologist says 'consistent with either'.”
“I didn't fall.”
“Do you remember?”
I could lie. It would be simpler.
“No. I remember lacing up my shoes in the hall. After that, I remember a ceiling.”
She writes. She doesn't look disappointed. She looks like someone who would rather not be told stories.
“Let's go back over the dates,” she says. “Because with you, the dates don't add up.”
“My dates are right.”
She leafs through.
“On Monday 2 November, at twelve minutes past three, from the phone in your room, you called a mobile. Fifteen seconds.”
“My number. The only one that came back to me, that day. A woman answered, she said 'Hello?', I said, 'It's Nadia, I'm in hospital…' She hung up. I thought I'd got a digit wrong.”
“You hadn't got it wrong. It's Mrs Nadia Castan's number.”
“It's mine.”
She lets that go. She turns a page.
“On Wednesday the 4th, you finally give your address in Marquette. A colleague rings Mr Castan the same day.”
She reads.
“'Mr Castan states: my wife is right here next to me.' A patrol calls round in the evening. The lady of the house produces Nadia Castan's ID card. My colleague filed it.”
I don't say anything for a while.
4 November. Three days before he opened the door to me in his socks.
“He knew,” I say. “Since Wednesday he's known that a woman in the hospital was saying her name was Nadia. He knew she had a hole in her head. He didn't come and look.”
“He says he had no reason to come. His wife was right next to him.”
“And you think that's normal? A man is told that an injured woman nobody can identify is using his wife's name, and he doesn't even come along out of curiosity?”
Wattez takes a sip of cold coffee. She grimaces.
“In my experience, madam, a lot of people don't come along.”
She went round to rue des Haleurs this morning, at half past seven, before Grégoire left for work. She tells me so, straight out.
“ID card, the little one's health record, the family record book. The husband, the teenager. The baby in his high chair. Everything's in order.”
“Of course everything's in order. They're my papers.”
“Or hers.”
“Get someone up from Toulouse. My best friend. My colleagues at the pharmacy. Anybody who's known me for more than two months.”
She sighs. It's the first human thing she's done since I walked in.
“Listen. For now, what I've got on my desk is a family dispute. A head-injury victim with no papers, saying one thing. A married couple, with papers, saying the opposite. I'll send a request to Toulouse for interviews. It'll take weeks.”
“Weeks.”
“I haven't got a plane, madam. I've got a form.”
So I take out the hoop.
I've wrapped it in a paper tissue, folded in four, at the bottom of my jeans pocket. I put it on her desk and unfold the tissue. I push it towards her with my fingertip.
“It was in my things from 17 October. The hospital put it on the list of what was found on me. Look at the clasp. It was ripped out.”
Wattez looks at it without touching it.
“And?”
“My ears aren't pierced.”
I take off my hat. I show her my left ear, then the right, on the side with the scar. She looks at my earlobes. She looks for a long time, longer than she looked at the scar.
She opens a drawer, takes out a pair of blue gloves and an evidence bag. She picks the hoop up by the hinge and slides it inside. She writes on the label.
“I'm sealing it as evidence,” she says. “I'm not promising anything.”
“I didn't ask you for anything.”
She raises an eyebrow. One corner of her mouth moves, barely.
I ask her if I can use a phone. I've got barely more than three euros left on the flip phone, and Montreal would eat that in a minute.
She hesitates, then hands me the receiver of her desk phone.
“Keep it short. I'll get my knuckles rapped for an international call.”
It's eleven o'clock. In Montreal it's five in the morning. I dial my big sister Kenza's number from memory. Six years since I last dialled it. The digits come by themselves, in the right order.
Three rings. Voicemail. Her voice, deeper than I remember it, in French, then in English.
I don't know what to say. The last time I spoke to her was on the phone, in April 2020, and I told her she'd always been far away.
“It's me,” I say. “It's Nadia. Call me back on this number, please.”
I read out the number of the flip phone. I hang up.
Wattez pretends to read her file.
“There's someone else here who knows me,” I say. “The paediatrician in Marquette. I took Sacha to her on 22 September, for bronchiolitis. She saw me for a quarter of an hour. She'll recognise me.”
“Maybe.”
“Why maybe?”
Wattez closes her notebook.
“Because she sees thirty kids a day. She looks at the kid.”
She stands up. She stays standing at the window, her hands in the pockets of her khaki parka.
She doesn't turn round straight away.
“I rang your paediatrician. She saw Sacha on 20 October for an ear infection. With his mum.”
The radiator knocks. I think about the date. I turn it over in my head, like a box of medicine when you're checking the expiry date.
“On 20 October, I was in a coma.”