LITMIR.BIZ

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because I’m so ill at ease that they prefer not to look me in the face if they can avoid it. I’m fascinated by the vast size of the headmistress. She really takes up a lot of room. The Hyena has sat down as usual, legs apart, chin up, and is asking a series of precise questions, taking down notes on a little pad, in her tiny close-packed writing. I wonder what this lady thinks about the huge skull rings.

      “. . . yes, often absent, which is a real problem for us. Apart from the last two weeks, when she’s attended all her lessons, we’ve had trouble getting her to come regularly. She doesn’t turn up for detentions either . . . I discussed her a lot with her teachers before the police came. She didn’t confide in any of them in particular. She had good grade averages on the whole. This is a private school, and we specialize in helping students who haven’t performed well elsewhere. That’s not exactly her problem. Valentine wasn’t outstanding, but she didn’t have any trouble with her school work.”

      “Was she good at any subjects in particular?”

      I ask myself what criteria the Hyena has in the questions she asks. As if the head is going to tell us that she was good at math and, eureka, we’d go and look for her in a chess tournament. The thing is, she puts her questions with such aplomb, and this ingratiating air of being serious and concerned, that the person facing her offers answers without realizing the absurdity of the conversation.

      “No, there are some assignments she hands in, and gets reasonable grades for”—the head is turning over the records so that the Hyena can see them, she’s completely eliminated me from her field of vision—“and there are some tests or assignments she doesn’t deign to do at all. That’s why her average has gone down, you see: she has zeroes in every subject somewhere, but the grades she does get are around ten out of twenty. Which is quite good, for these students.”

      The Hyena has more shock questions up her sleeve. If she carries on like this we’ll be here all afternoon. I try not to fall asleep.

      “And how did she get along with her classmates?”

      “Well, again, I asked her teachers, before talking to the police . . . but I didn’t gather much, I’m afraid. She’s never been scolded for mouthing off or fighting, she wasn’t a chatterbox. I saw her apparently getting along with the other students when she was here, but I’ve never noticed her making particular friends with any group or individual. Let’s say that she mostly turned up because she’d been told to, and we do insist on that, and because her grandmother kept tabs on her, but we never sensed any enthusiasm. The possibility of expelling her had come up several times, because we can’t accept a child who makes the others think school is optional, but we never took that step, because it’s equally hard to expel a child who has never caused any discipline problems.”

      Blah blah blah, I’ve already noted the fees: at three thousand five hundred euros a term, I imagine that students who are expelled from this school must at the very least have tried to massacre the others with a chainsaw.

      The head accompanies us to the main door, repeating to the Hyena that no, the police don’t seem to know at all what’s happened. I wait for her to go back in.

      “Lucky we came, eh? Fantastically interesting. She told us piles of things she didn’t think of telling the police, so we’re way ahead of them.”

      “Do you ever get fed up of being so negative?”

      “I’m not being negative. I could have told you about her grades without us having to sit and sweat in this bell jar: if you would have read the file, everything’s in there. The grandmother had told me about them. And that she cut class, same thing, mega scoop. That’s why I was hired in the first place.”

      “And it doesn’t strike you as interesting that precisely for the two weeks you’ve been following her, she’s been coming to school every day?”

      “Yes of course it has. And it pisses me off, believe me.”

      I said that for no special reason, just to say something back, but you would think I’d made the gag of the year, the Hyena bursts out laughing and looks at me almost with affection. I think perhaps she’s flirting with me, but at the same time what do I know?

      “Show me where the kids eat lunch.”

      The school is on the banks of the Seine, in one of those districts full of office buildings and fancy apartments where it doesn’t seem possible that anyone needs to go out for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. Car sales, stereo equipment, computer shops. But nothing much that’s convivial, bars, restaurants, or little boutiques. I’ve never understood why there are never any practical shops or nice coffee bars in the areas where the very rich live. Is it such poor taste to eat out? So the kids have the choice between a brasserie which is very expensive and a long way off, and a tiny shop that sells little plates of sushi and three kinds of sandwich on white bread. That was a problem for me: passing unnoticed in such a small place was difficult. Luckily, the young don’t usually bother looking at people my age. I point out to the Hyena a table where I recognize some pupils from Valentine’s class. She’s taken off her jacket now, and slung it over her shoulder, revealing the Japanese-sailor-type tattoos that crawl all over her arms. She goes up to the biggest of them, by instinct; he has the face of a mischievous child on the body of a lumberjack.

      “I work for a firm of private investigators. Valentine’s parents have called us in to back up the police effort.”

      A small curly-headed youth with freckled cheeks, wearing a hoodie and wide trousers, sees fit to reply. “Yeah, they’re right, the police do fuck all, look at the traffic chaos everywhere.”

      Chorus: “The police didn’t even come to talk to us.”

      “There wasn’t anything on the TV news, was there? So what did they care?”

      “Yeah, that’s right, there was this girl last summer and she’d been gone a week, and people recognized her from the photo, so how are people going to know she’s missing?”

      The Hyena hasn’t sat down yet, she’s listening to them seriously and casting an amused look over them. I’m two paces behind, and not too surprised that not one of them says, “Hey, you’re always around here.” My talent is being invisible.

      “Did you know her well? Did she have many friends in school?”

      “No, she wasn’t all that friendly with people in school.”

      “Yeah, she could be, she sometimes ate her lunch with us. But mostly she went off on her own with her iPod.”

      “Mostly she didn’t come back either.”

      “She was a bit snobbish with us, if you want to know. If you said something, she’d put on this superior air and say the opposite. She was more friendly at the beginning of the year, I thought . . .”

      “She’s not friends with any of us on Facebook, is she?”

      “We don’t even know if she has a Facepuke page, actually . . .”

      “But did she have problems with anyone at school?”

      “Nah, not even. Perhaps she thought she shouldn’t be here at all. Dunno.”

      “And none of you saw her outside school?”

      “Yeah, I did, but it was a long time ago, oh, about three months ago. But we had words.” This is a dark-haired girl with very pale skin speaking: she looks intelligent, but so languid that you feel like shaking her to see if she’ll switch on.

      “What happened?”

      The girl who’d said this purses her lips and looks at the ceiling, not sure how to reply. The other kids burst out laughing.

      The curly-haired one, who didn’t think the police were doing their job, intervenes. “Valentine’s a bit weird. Kind of okay, but weird. Very hot. Especially when she’s had a few.”

      “She ought to be in the ads against binge drinking for teenagers. You really wouldn’t want to be her when she’s

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