Garnier twisted his head to look at the solid wall, as if there were a window there. ‘Things can happen when we least expect them,’ he said. Ignoring Delaney’s question as he looked back at him.
‘You know, Garnier, you open your mouth and I get the smell of raw sewage in my nostrils. What am I doing here?’
‘Do you believe in vengeance, inspector? Do you believe that revenge is a dish best served cold? No, I can see it in your eyes. You don’t wait, do you, Delaney? You’re an Irishman driven by passions you can neither control nor live with. You’re an addict, aren’t you, just like me?’
‘You’re a bug. A cockroach. I’m nothing like you. I’m a human being, Garnier.’
Garnier looked at him for a long moment without replying. ‘You believe in a final judgement, don’t you, Inspector Delaney?’
‘What I believe or don’t believe has got nothing to do with you. Either tell me what you want to tell me or I am leaving. Right now.’
‘What’s the time?’
Delaney glanced at his watch. ‘It’s ten o’clock and I’m out of here.’ He watched Garnier, waiting. Sometimes it was all about waiting. Delaney didn’t know why he was there but Garnier was after something. He could see it in the glittering of his eyes, in the moistness of his breath, in the hot flush that was suffusing his pale flesh like a rash.
Garnier quirked the corner of his mouth again. ‘The girl you rescued.’ He gestured as if searching his memory. ‘What’s her name now?’
He asked the question in an innocent enough way, but his eyes had focused and Delaney was sure that this was the question he had been brought here to answer.
‘Your fifteen minutes of fame, wasn’t it? The girl rescued from a monster by a handsome young policeman. The girl in the boot. Whatever became of her, I wonder?’
Garnier tilted his head slightly, like a bird, looking at Delaney. Watching his reactions.
Delaney held his gaze, the muscles in his neck tightening visibly. When he spoke his voice was heavy, laden with threat.
‘You attempt to put yourself in my life and you will regret it, Garnier.’
‘You put your own self in my life, inspector, the day you took that young girl.’ He coughed into his hand, his whole body suddenly racked with spasms. Then his body shuddered and grew calm again. ‘She was the last,’ he said and looked up again at Delaney, the corner of his mouth twitching once more like a grub exposed to sunlight. ‘And I know what you did with her.’
‘You know nothing about me.’
Garnier smiled almost fondly. ‘See, you and me, Jack. We’re alike in so many ways. I’m a Catholic too now – did you know that.’
‘No. I must have missed the memo on that one,’ said Delaney sarcastically. ‘While I was busy having a life.’
‘Busy indeed, Jack. Busy indeed.’
‘You call me Jack one more time and I will break every fucking tooth in your mouth.’
Garnier looked up at the security camera mounted on the ceiling.
‘It’s switched off.’
Garnier shook his head. ‘I doubt that, but no matter. It’s the violence in you that I admire, inspector. All that rage, all that fury lashing out at the world. It’s a coping mechanism. It saves you from those thoughts you have. Those desires.’
‘You’ve become a psychoanalyst as well as a Catholic, have you? Did you learn anything in your studies about a man who rapes children and then strangles them as he climaxes?’
‘Indeed I did. Our God is a violent god, inspector. A slaughterer of innocents. There’s more blood in the Old Testament than love. You know that to be a fact. Sex and blood. It’s always been there. You understand this.’
Delaney looked at him, not responding. Waiting.
‘See, both you and I know, detective, that the world is made of chaos, not order.’
‘That so?’
Garnier nodded excitedly, warming to his theme, oblivious to Delaney’s sarcasm. ‘And there is an imperative in the human psyche either to embrace that chaos or to try and tame it. The first is irrelevant and the second is a fool’s errand. God knows that. The God of the Old Testament. Our existences are scattered fragments of meaning. You try to fit the shapes together, resolve the randomness of things, like a jigsaw puzzle building bit by bit to make a perfect picture. You have to get each piece in order to make sense of the world, don’t you?’
Delaney shifted uncomfortably. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘Yes, you do. It’s like that perfect portrait of Christ and his disciples on the jigsaw your mother bought for you when you were seven years old and had just had your first holy communion.’
Delaney snorted. ‘You know nothing about me.’
‘I know you have to make the pieces fit. It’s everything about you because you broke it in the first place.’
‘And you?’
‘Me? If I wanted to make a piece fit I’d cut the head of it till it did. It’s my picture that is important. No one else’s. God knows this.’
Delaney stood up and walked to the door. ‘Like I said, talking to you, Garnier, is like swimming in a cesspool.
