The Awkward Squad Page 17

  Capestan jumped on the spot to try and make him out in the crowd. He couldn’t just vanish like that. Naulin had seen him at Marie Sauzelle’s place, and now they had run into him outside Maëlle Guénan’s building. Along with the sailor’s petition, this boy was a link. The squad had a new thread to bind the two cases together. So long as he was good to talk, all they had to do was ask a few questions to get an explanation. And yet somehow he had already managed to cut and run.

  The lights were refusing to change. Capestan attempted to take one step, but a Chevrolet skimmed past her and sent her flying back onto the pavement. The Squirrel must have been making good headway. As the next car sped past, Capestan made a spontaneous dash for it.

  Behind she could hear Torrez’s panic-stricken voice shouting “No!!” at the top of his lungs, but by then she had made it to the middle of the boulevard. Holding up her hand to slow down the oncoming traffic, she crossed the last section of the road and leapt onto the pavement. A hundred yards ahead she could make out the green helmet disappearing into the distance. She upped her pace.

  Without slowing down for a second, the boy glanced back to see Capestan fast approaching. He wove his way through the pedestrians and veered left down passage Lemoine. The commissaire lost him and started really sprinting, reaching the passage just in time to see him take a right onto boulevard de Sébastopol. She hurtled after him, knocking into two men smoking on the pavement outside a jeans shop.

  Who was this boy? What was he doing there?

  He’d crossed boulevard de Sébastopol and was level with rue de Tracy when a woman suddenly moved her bicycle forward, sending him completely off-balance as he bore down on her. Capestan was afraid he might jump onto the bike and lose her once and for all, but no, he swerved abruptly to avoid the woman, buying the commissaire a few precious yards. Her lungs were starting to burn and she wondered how long she’d be able to keep this pace up. Ahead, her target—twenty years her junior and with fewer miles on the clock—was still charging along, showing no sign of slowing down. Capestan needed to find a way of catching him fast: if it came down to stamina, she didn’t stand a chance.

  How did he know Marie and Maëlle? What did he want from them?

  He turned past the railings of square Émile-Chautemps and erupted onto rue Saint-Martin, barging into someone leaving the post office and sending his parcel flying onto the street. The man was unleashing a volley of furious obscenities as Capestan tore past him. She spotted the green helmet cutting diagonally across the junction with rue Réaumur, and was summoning her final reserves of energy when a screech of brakes made her turn sideways. A bus was heading right for her. She could make out the driver’s horrified expression through the windshield. Capestan had just enough time to raise her arm to protect herself.

  She felt an impact, but it wasn’t the bus: a pair of hands had shoved her in the back and propelled her forward onto the far pavement. As she landed, her hip slammed onto the concrete and she let out a cry of pain. Capestan heard the dull thud of a collision behind her and people screaming all around. She looked back and saw Torrez stretched out on the ground, blood gushing from his head. Clutching her side, she crawled toward him, calling out to him, praying he wasn’t dead. Slowly he lifted his head and looked at her and, with a lopsided smile, reassured her with a weak voice:

  “I’m fine. I’m happy.”

  He was still smiling when he passed out.

  The wail of an ambulance drew nearer. Capestan sat next to the lieutenant and waited.

  35

  A long-haired medic had just taken over from the on-call doctor. Torrez had a broken collarbone and extensive bruising, including one that covered the whole of his right thigh. He had been severely shaken up, but his days were no longer numbered. He was sleeping.

  Rosière swung open the double doors separating the intensive care unit from the main lobby, quickly followed by Lebreton.

  “He’s going to be fine,” Capestan said.

  The two officers heaved a sigh of relief.

  “They’re going to transfer him to his own room. His wife is on her way, but we’ll have to do shifts, too, to make sure someone from the squad is always here.”

  “Of course,” Lebreton said, then held out an item of clothing. “We recovered the hoodie.”

  Capestan noticed cat hair on the sleeves. It would need to go in for some tests. She asked Lebreton to take care of it, and also to arrange for a lookout to keep tabs on the boy’s bike.

  What a waste letting him get away like that.

  “The kid matches Naulin’s description, right?” Rosière said.

  “Yes. We absolutely have to identify him. He’s linked to both victims—we need to find out how. We need to question him, but first we need to find him.”

  “Bearing in mind his age, he could be anyone: a son, a nephew, a student, someone’s younger brother . . . ,” Lebreton said, trailing off.

  Capestan’s face suddenly lit up:

  “The Guénan boy?”

  “No. They had a framed photo: it’s not him.”

  The commissaire shook her head slowly and stared down the corridor, thinking for a few seconds as she rubbed the scar on her finger.

  “We need Naulin to remember the exact words of his conversation with the boy, and we need to call everyone again: Jallateau, André Sauzelle, the victims’ friends, even that property developer . . . If possible, we’ll need to talk to Maëlle Guénan’s son. They’re roughly the same age. Maybe our Squirrel was looking for him?”

  Capestan stood up straight and turned to Lebreton.

  “Commandant, I’m going to leave this research in your hands. I’m off to see Buron. Our information is becoming too important to keep them in the cold. I’m going to request that we join forces for the investigation.”

  Rosière looked unsure.

  “He’ll never agree,” she warned the commissaire. “At least not without something to cushion those butt cheeks of his.”

  Before braving the headquarters of the police judiciaire and meeting with the big cheese himself, Capestan decided to take a breather along the Seine, strolling gently down the embankment. After Notre-Dame, the riverside momentarily lost its touristy charm, with the occasional lampposts lighting up nothing but loose paving stones spattered with bird droppings and pigeon feathers. As she walked through the dingy underpass beneath Pont Saint-Michel, she could hear the brackish water lapping at the river wall. The smell of this mire added to the city’s fetid stench. Her footsteps echoed in the archway, then suddenly the embankment widened again and she was back in the hubbub of normal Paris. As a reflex action, Capestan sat down on the bench where she used to escape to think during her days in the brigade de répression du banditisme. She shivered at the touch of the cold stone. She was trying hard to clear her head when she was disturbed by the shrill laugh of a man talking to a friend. That laugh, that frame: for a split-second Capestan thought it was her ex-husband, and a profound sadness weighed down on her shoulders. She dismissed the image hurriedly and stood up. It was time to see Buron.

  36

  Buron’s lair was now filled top to bottom with old glass cabinets displaying exhibits of every description: medals, pipes, antique pill boxes, leather-bound anthologies of French poetry, and, within easy reach, the pearls of his spectacles collection, which he alternated depending on whether he was in a mood for flirtation or manipulation. Dusk was falling over the river, and the gloomy room was lit only by the faint glow of an emerald-green lamp. As Capestan came in, the chief remained seated and simply gestured toward the chair opposite his. He left his paperwork where it was on his desk and put the top back on his pen, laying it on the documents for later.

  “Good evening, Capestan. I don’t have an awful lot of time. What brings you here?”

  “I want our squad attached to the brigade criminelle for the rue Mazagran investigation.”

  “Out of the question,” Buron said, lining up the edges of his pile of paper.

  �
��We have complementary information from investigating the husband’s murder and—”

  “No. I said no.”

  Buron had decided to play obtuse. Capestan shifted her weight and leaned forward. She could not understand why he was putting up such a resistance. It made no sense.

  “So what exactly are we supposed to do? Why create our unit if we can’t even offer our help?”

  “As I’ve told you already, it’s to bundle all of you together. Don’t make me spell it out for you again . . . ,” he said, waving his hand exaggeratedly.

  “No, I’d like you to.”

  “Capestan . . . We put you all in the same pound because we had to isolate you. You are all unmanageable. More to the point, you are all un-de-sir-able. I don’t want you anywhere near an official investigation.”

  “You can’t tar us all with that brush. We’re not so terrible,” Capestan protested, before the memory of her own track record forced her to change tack. “Fine, perhaps not in my case, but the others are—”

  “The only reason you’re all there is because we can’t fire you!” Buron snapped, hammering each syllable home. “Can’t you get that into your head? We’re paying you to play dominoes or do some knitting. Get Évrard to teach you baccarat! Anything, commissaire, but just leave me in peace.”

  Buron was hopping mad. Capestan was exhausted: she was done in by the chase, Torrez was out for the count, the boy was still at large, and her hip was killing her. She had come to offer valuable information and instead she found herself on the receiving end of an unfair tirade. Her head was in a mush. She felt completely at sea.

  “They’re not all completely nuts. I don’t understand—”

  “Not all completely nuts? Get a life, Capestan! Dax and Lewitz are hyperactive cretins, then there’s that grape-brain Merlot, Rosière and her wretched soap opera, Torrez—”

  “Actually Torrez is in the hospital . . .”

  “Why won’t he just resign and stop plaguing us with his bad luck! And don’t get me started on Orsini . . .”

  Capestan had had her fill. Buron was going overboard and there was no way she’d be able to talk him down. She opted for an abrupt change of strategy.

  “Does your catalog of flawed character traits happen to include ‘underhandedness’?”

  “Capestan, that’s quite enough . . . ,” the chief said, leaning back in his chair and unfolding the arms of his metal-rimmed glasses.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve done a little digging. Riverni—now that wouldn’t be the same Riverni who stonewalled you back in 2009, by any chance? And also, while I think of it, what’s with these cases we keep picking up? Are we the only people who know there’s a link, or not? Crim throws out cases just like that and you don’t seem to see anything wrong with it? The brigade criminelle ignoring criminal activity? Seriously, what’s going on?”

  Buron twisted his glasses pensively, not answering. His basset hound’s eyes were watering slightly as usual. If it weren’t for his gray crew cut, he wouldn’t have looked like a police officer at all. He scratched the side of his head with the end of his glasses. The two of them sat there in silence.

  Capestan shifted her gaze outside the window. The plane tree on the embankment had shed its last leaves. The prickly seedballs were covered in petrified bugs, clinging on for dear life, lending them the appearance of baubles on some macabre Christmas tree. Capestan sighed and turned back to Buron.

  “The fact is, I know you’ve stowed us away over there on purpose. You want us to answer the questions you’re asking yourself. You know exactly which buttons to press to get me going, but I know you, too, Monsieur le Directeur. I’m not sure why yet, but you have some cases that you want handled in secret. That’s why you set up our squad. That’s the only reason. So give me the resources I need. We’ll investigate on the down-low if that’s how it has to be, but I want the Maëlle Guénan file.”

  A faint, sporting smile of defeat snuck across Buron’s face, and again Capestan was left with the unpleasant feeling that she had been led exactly where he wanted her.

  “I’ll get you a copy of the file,” he said.

  “And a siren,” Capestan said. “For Torrez. He misses his siren.”

  37

  The smell of frying onions was wafting down the stairs, hitting Capestan with a sudden and powerful urge to eat. Tucked under her arm was the copy of the Maëlle Guénan file that Buron had eventually managed to secure for her. She wiped her feet on the doormat and walked into the commissariat.

  It was 9:00 p.m. and the flat was pitch black apart from a strip of light under the door into the kitchen—no doubt the source of the appetizing aroma, however unlikely it was for a police station. Capestan was starting to feel comfortable in this squad. Life was rolling along happily, and a budding solidarity was forming. The job seemed less serious here.

  She put the file on her desk and stood in the darkness, looking out at the square through the windowpane. The street lamps were casting a yellow glow onto the rain-streaked pavement below. What with the colorful neon signs of its multiple sex shops, rue Saint-Denis seemed to be boasting a bit of Belle Époque swagger. Attic windows interrupted the zinc roofs across the square. For a moment it was hard to work out whether they were in the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec or Ratatouille.

  In the building to the right, a large, curtainless window revealed an average-size room that must have been a studio apartment. A young man in a T-shirt was sitting at a table, staring at his laptop as he tore the plastic blister off a package of processed ham. He rolled up a slice and guzzled it in two bites. After consigning two further slices to the same fate, he scratched at the bottom of the package to dislodge a bright-red sticker, probably some sort of coupon. He rocked to one side to get his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, opened the flap, and carefully placed the coupon into one of the slits reserved for credit cards.

  Coupons. Capestan felt a pang of nostalgia as she remembered her grandmother. Every morning, swathed in her brown-and-gold-patterned kimono, she would sit at the head of her huge oak monastery table in the kitchen. She would pour hot water onto her chicory coffee granules, light a cigarette, and then attack the previous day’s stack of brochures and leaflets. She turned each page meticulously and, whenever she hit upon a suitably attractive offer, she would balance her cigarette on the ashtray, pluck the pair of scissors from beside her on the table, and cut out the precious token. She would then file it away in one of three categories: food, hardware, services. It was like piling up banknotes, only with more color, more variety—a glimpse of a world where everything should be sampled. None of the grandchildren at the table would ever dare disturb a task of such importance. They simply watched in fascination.

  Capestan took a step back from the window and was about to join her colleagues in the kitchen when a thought came to her with an electrifying jolt: the box of coupons on Marie Sauzelle’s shelf and the sticker saying NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE on her mailbox. The two were completely incompatible. If Sauzelle collected coupons, she was hardly going to block off her principal supply. The sticker must have been put there by someone else. If Marie had not gotten rid of it, that was because she hadn’t seen it. And if she had not seen it, that was because she was dead when it was put there.

  The killer had brought it with him.

  But why? No doubt to avoid the full-mailbox effect, which is a surefire indicator that either someone is away or something is amiss. The neighbors would have become worried sooner, and the murderer had wanted to delay the discovery of the body.

  Why else? The sticker had not served to complicate the autopsy: the cause of death, by strangling, was clear enough. Capestan concentrated for a moment. The delay it caused, however, had made it impossible to establish the time of death with any certainty, thereby allowing the murderer time to come up with an alibi.

  He had acted alone and he did not associate with anyone trustworthy enough to cover for him.

  If the killer had c
ome with the sticker on his person, then the murder was not opportunistic: it was premeditated. They were no longer dealing with a hothead who couldn’t keep his emotions in check, but a calculating assassin. Capestan’s thoughts returned to the old lady and her dignified posture, then to the spared cat. A calculating criminal with some degree of moral awareness, but who, if the link with the Guénans turned out to be rock solid, had without hesitation killed three people.

  The commissaire nudged open the kitchen door to find Rosière standing before the old gas stove, stirring a vast copper saucepan with a wooden spoon. She could hear some onions sweating in olive oil. Pilou was glued to his mistress’s heel, on the lookout as ever for any scraps to blot the pristine floor. Lebreton was smoking on a chair in the open doorway onto the terrace. They had opened a bottle and were sipping their wine. Capestan noticed the pile of mysterious planks that Lewitz had left at the foot of the bay window. He obviously rated his carpentry skills highly and had vowed to create a fully fitted-out kitchen. The brand-new toolbox might have suggested that he was really a novice, although a plastic container of hinges and a bag of assorted handles implied that the squad was at the mercy of a DIY enthusiast. The kitchen was to be installed with determination rather than ability.

  “What are you still doing here?” Capestan exclaimed chirpily, more to announce her presence than anything else. “Don’t you have homes to go to?”

  Lebreton turned to the terrace with a minuscule frown and blew out a plume of smoke. There was a tinge of sadness in Rosière’s grin, so Capestan hastily added:

  “Me neither, as you can see. Smells good.”