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  He had stuck at it, passing his exams and earning his stripes. He played the game, waiting patiently to turn thirty. He was still going, and soon he would be back in action.

  The month before, it had taken just one second for him to stray off-course. One fleeting moment at the police fair and here he was in this tiny office.

  It was recoverable. Open dossiers, maintain communications and soon he would be back in the Varappe Division.

  Commissaire Serge Rufus’s murder.

  Their instructions: only hand over files that are of no interest; forget to include important sheets in their reports. We don’t want those loose cannons investigating anything of substance. Don’t let them snap at our heels. The case was practically sewn up anyway. A guy had confessed that very morning.

  So, which files would he send next?

  Diament smiled. This pile here seemed just the ticket.

  14

  Capestan crossed the room with the latest bundle in her hand. Lieutenant Diament had also sent across the video footage from the surveillance cameras at the cemetery.

  Dax, wearing one of those headsets with a built-in microphone, was typing away like his life depended on it. Capestan glanced at the screen on her way past, which was dominated by a moorland covered in an army of dwarves. In the foreground, a troll with green fur was leaping up and down and swiping at the air with a sword.

  “Dax! Surely you’re not playing games with the suspect?”

  The wild-eyed lieutenant replied with nose still glued to the monitor, and the troll still butchering the enemy:

  “Actually, I am – is it bugging you? He was so slick the way I made him that he’s become my avatar . . . Anyway, it’s no biggie, we don’t even know who he is! Until we know his name, it’s – ”

  “This is an online game, isn’t it? Anyone can see this . . .”

  “Yeah, so it works as an appeal for witnesses too!”

  “But we don’t want to make an appeal for witnesses! We’re not even sure this guy has anything to do with the murder. For the moment, no-one’s identified him – we’re basing it purely on the shopkeeper’s memories. It might turn out he was mistaken or got the day wrong, and that this man was just picking up some mugs for his little sister. Dax, you’ve got to . . .”

  Capestan suddenly leaned in to see the corner of the screen:

  “You’ve even named him ‘The Killer’!”

  Dax quit his game. He was starting to get the feeling he was in trouble. He lowered his voice to answer:

  “Well, yeah . . . ’Cause we still don’t know his name . . .”

  The lieutenant seemed so contrite, without being sure why, that the commissaire did not have the heart to nag him, settling instead to summarise the matter:

  “Listen, for a whole heap of reasons that I don’t have time to explain, I’d really prefer it if you picked a different avatar and leave this hidden at the back of your P.C. Can I count on you?”

  Grudgingly, his frown gave way to a dutiful nod.

  “Noted.”

  Then, as if to confirm his agreement, he wrote “Do not play with suspect” in capital letters on a Post-it and stuck it on the side of his monitor, beneath the previous one.

  Anyone popping in from head office was going to have a field day.

  *

  Capestan went into the snooker room, where Rosière was pinning tinsel to the window frames. Lebreton, Merlot, Évrard and Torrez were deep into another game of three-on-one. The rat squeaked as Merlot nearly flattened him during an attempt to pot the black. Rosière let out a shudder of disgust.

  “What did you call him in the end?” she asked, no doubt trying to face her fear.

  “Ratafia, like the animated film.”

  “Don’t you mean Ratatouille?”

  “No, no, Ratafia – it’s a play on words.”

  “Yes, but Ratatouille would be the right play on words. It’s a children’s film, so they chose to pun on a vegetable dish rather than a fortified wine . . .”

  “Well, his name is Ratafia,” Merlot said, displeased at being contradicted about so trivial a matter.

  As the conversation appeared to have reached a close, Capestan shook the chunky brown envelope she was holding.

  “A present from number 36!”

  “Is it the video from the camera at the cemetery?” Rosière asked straight away.

  “Yes.”

  The capitaine made a flouncy about-turn, clamped a drawing pin between her teeth, then carried on putting up the thick red tinsel.

  “Well, we all know there won’t be anything on it . . .”

  “Eva – ”

  “Anne, you know as well as I do, come on!” Rosière huffed over her shoulder. “Those files you’ve got there, what are they? Are they dated this month, or last month?”

  Capestan quickly checked the spines.

  “1998, 2002, 1999 . . .” she said.

  “And let me guess – they’ve not managed to find the latest bank records?”

  “Correct.”

  Capestan was beginning to get to know Rosière. Right now she was just having a bad day and letting off some steam.

  “Basically, the only reason we landed the Rufus case is because you knew the victim and are likely to get exclusive info. from the son. As far as the boss men are concerned, it wouldn’t make a fat load of difference if we sat around on our butts playing marbles.”

  She was absolutely right. In essence, if not in tone.

  “No doubt, Eva. But is that stopping you? If so, since when? Your work on Maire’s double identity was tip-top, yet here you are in your slippers stringing up tinsel as though the job’s done and dusted. Already got your sights set on retirement? I know you don’t, so quit with the whinging because it’s driving us down even further. Also,” Capestan said, unleashing her finest smile, “don’t forget we’re in the middle of an investigation and that we’re ahead of the game. That other lot are playing tough guys, flipping every Mafioso mattress in town without finding a thing. Whoever they’ve got in custody won’t get them anywhere, whereas we’ve got a hundred leads.”

  “Fair enough, Anne, you win. My bad . . .”

  To give Rosière her due, she was pretty quick to admit when she was wrong and could curb her moods.

  “Plus, we didn’t stop at nattering with the widow or enjoying a game of belote – we did some extra digging,” Rosière said.

  Capestan sat down in one of the big leather armchairs around the coffee table. Her colleagues went to fetch some files, notebooks and stools before joining her, with the exception of Torrez, who hitched a buttock on the edge of the snooker table. The commissaire put a pad of A4 paper on her armrest and clicked the top of her biro.

  “What have we got and what have we not got? Jacques Melonne, for example – do we know who he is?”

  “Not yet. He’s been called Jacques Maire since the Internet became a thing, so the name Jacques Melonne doesn’t appear when you Google it. Orsini has tucked into the newspaper archive, but with just a name and nothing else to go on, he doesn’t stand much chance. Yes, yes,” Rosière added, before Capestan could look up, “of course he’s cross-referencing with Rufus. But in terms of links with organised crime, Central Archives – ”

  “I know, we don’t have access,” Capestan said with a wince.

  “No, we do,” Rosière said, “so long as we provide three handwritten copies of the request and wait until Star Wars 22 comes out.”

  Henri Saint-Lô had drawn up a stool. The others widened the circle to let him in. With the precision of an acrobat, he twirled the stool into position, then settled atop it with a soft leap, making the lowly folk to his side seem like they had concrete blocks for shoes. But he did not appear to be playing to the gallery with his displays of deftness – rather he was possessed of a genuine love of finesse. He had a wide-angled approach to life, occupying a space that juxtaposed the real world. He was so close, yet so alone. With a frown, he signalled that he was listening. Capesta
n resumed.

  “We can’t compare the firearms, either,” she said with an air of regret. “Shame, but we’ll have to do without. What about the money at the furniture workshop – any luck tracing where it came from?”

  “Switzerland,” Évrard replied. “He had a company car with a subscription to the péage and a Total card. We managed to persuade the bookkeeper to copy the documents for us. Same movements every month. That doesn’t tell us the provenance of the dosh, of course – but a monthly drive to and from Geneva sounds like money laundering.”

  “Dodgy provenance, though, I imagine.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  Pilote made the most of the short silence to let loose a powerful yawn, which he rounded off with a squeak of contentment. He hoisted himself up one leg at a time, stretched the length of his body, then trotted off to his bowl, not without a quick sniff at Torrez’s shoe on the way past. The rat leapt out of Merlot’s pocket and scampered up to his shoulder.

  “Though this does all furnish us with a date,” Saint-Lô said, twizzling his moustache pensively.

  “Meaning?”

  “Surely Maire did not expose himself to the perils that led to his slaying during his latter days as Seigneur de L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue – no, this must have happened in his shadow years. Hence the change of name. As such, the link with the victims dates from before. Twenty years past, or perchance in their even greener days.”

  Capestan had arrived at the same conclusion. And she knew where Serge Rufus had been working twenty years ago.

  “We need to find out when Rufus crossed paths with Jacques Melonne prior to his change of identity. Twenty years ago was when he was posted in Paris, just after Lyon. Because we don’t yet have precise dates, I think we should look into both regions. In any event, we should probably dig around some of the old stuff too,” Capestan said, waving the dog-eared papers from number 36, a knowing smile forming on her lips.

  “So the bigwigs have shot themselves in the foot!” Rosière said.

  “Exactly!” Capestan said, her smile broadening as the realisation slowly dawned on the rest of the team. “Old stuff is all we’ve got! Old and irrelevant . . .”

  “The twats!”

  “Steady on, Eva, these are our colleagues . . .” Lebreton said, trying to be responsible despite his gleeful expression.

  While the five of them leafed through the documents, annotating them and compiling lists of questions as they went, Lebreton went back to the street sign and the war memorial.

  “What about Rufus, and Melonne’s dates of birth . . . are they easily accessible?”

  “While you were in Provence, we all looked online, sticking to legal methods, and didn’t find anything. According to Dax, you’ve got to get around a couple of barriers on official websites to get them. Nothing particularly complex, but you’d still need a vague idea of how to hack.”

  “So our killer’s a hacker? A young person, maybe? Our victims are quite old, though.”

  “No, most likely the killer knew their dates of birth because he was close to them,” Torrez said, piping up from his perch.

  Without thinking, he released the cue ball with his left hand, sending it round the cushions until it rolled back straight into his palm.

  “Right, so we’re back to a killer of the same age with a link somewhere in the past. Torrez,” Capestan said, “we don’t have Maire’s backstory, but we do know Rufus’s – where he studied, schools, etc. Don’t we have his file from H.R. somewhere?”

  “Yes. Do you want to look on his class lists or at his uni. records to see if there are any Jacques?”

  “Worth a try.”

  Lewitz tiptoed into the room clutching a stack of wooden planks, discreetly gesturing at them not to pay him any attention. He laid them along the foot of the back wall and crept out even more quietly.

  “Have we had any matches on the phone records?” Rosière asked.

  “No, we checked with Dax. Nothing special. But Orsini is examining the company accounts and their Orange records, which the bookkeeper kindly photocopied for us too. Maybe they’ll throw something up. Let’s see tomorrow,” Torrez said, hopping down from the table.

  Six p.m. That was him off home. His departure planted an idea in Merlot’s mind, who suddenly leaped to his feet:

  “Aha, this evening there’s a rerun of the Miss France competition on television!”

  “Ah yes, excellent,” Rosière said, as if the information was of particular value. “Choosing Miss France – let’s make an evening of it.”

  “I don’t know what you think, dearest, but I wasn’t much taken by the president – Geneviève Something, isn’t it? – and her rules – ”

  “Come off it! Sure, she’s a stickler, but she runs a tight show for the girls . . .”

  There was no point whatsoever trying to intervene in the tide of debate between Merlot and Rosière who, without the least concern for their comrades still at work, headed to the sitting room and its vast flat-screen. Saint-Lô pursued them with his self-assured, man-of-action stride. Lebreton and Évrard looked at their watches, shrugged and, with a glance at the commissaire, got to their feet as well. She thought about it, then extracted herself from the deep leather armchair. She checked her mobile and saw a missed call from Buron. Before reaching the sitting room herself, she decided to phone him back.

  “Good evening, Monsieur le Directeur. You tried me earlier?”

  “Yes, Capestan, good evening. I just wanted to keep you abreast of the situation . . . One of the B.R.I. suspects has been referred to the public prosecutor. He’s confessed that the weapon was his, or at least ‘had been’ his. He’s got no alibi for the night of the murder, a criminal record the length of my arm, and bruising on his knuckles . . . In short, it’s over.”

  “‘Had been’?”

  “Yes, he claims he had sold it.”

  “To who?”

  “Some bloke with a beard and glasses, apparently! Quite frankly, these sorts of piss-takers could at least try to be a bit subtle.”

  There it was – they had a lead on the weapon. It wasn’t over at all.

  “No, no, that corresponds with our e-fit. And you’re forgetting the stiff in L’Isle – you can’t possibly close the case without factoring him in . . .”

  “I’m not forgetting anything, Capestan, thank you very much. The suspect’s just spent three years in Carpentras, twenty kilometres away from L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. I think it’s sewn up, commissaire. I’m sorry. Let’s compile all the elements and – ”

  “No! No, no. Give us a few more days on our own, otherwise our findings will come to nothing. The guy they have in custody, I’ve read his file, he’s of no interest whatsoever. He would never have come up with any sort of theatrics like the – ”

  “The suspect’s file . . . Unabridged, was it?”

  Capestan paused, her teeth clenched. Buron had found his target. All the same, she was not about to back down, not when they had got this far in their investigation.

  “. . . No, probably not. But it’s not him. Call it what you like, pride, inner conviction, but – ”

  “Permission granted, Capestan. If you want to carry on, go ahead. I’ll only inform H.Q. about the bare minimum. But don’t be under any illusions . . .”

  Buron might be quick to disagree with her, but he very rarely let her down. Capestan was hoping she could be the exact opposite.

  “Thank you, Monsieur le Directeur.”

  The team had reassembled and were now absorbed in fresh objectives: finding the channel, opening some red or white, etc. They seemed determined to hit the sofa to see who had been crowned the new Miss France. Évrard had taken it upon herself to lay a fire: a few scrunched-up bits of newspaper, some twigs and kindling, and three enormous logs – clearly the lieutenant was in it for the long haul.

  “Fires are forbidden in Paris, aren’t they?” Dax said.

  “What are you, Fireplace Police?” Évrard replied with a grin,
not straying from her task.

  Dax smiled back, before appearing to wonder whether such a force actually existed.

  “D’you reckon they would monitor the chimneys, or rely on informants?”

  Évrard did her best to ignore him as she wiped her sooty hands on her jeans.

  Sitting on the window sill, Saint-Lô contemplated the darkness outside. His eyes darted from the tiles to a flurry of pigeons, then settled on the orange glow of the street lamps. With his longish hair, powerful nose, trimmed beard and jaunty moustache, his profile was like something off an old coin.

  “Pizza, anyone?” Capestan said, glancing at Lebreton who, like her, was sticking around more for the atmosphere than the programme.

  “No! Spag. bol.!” Lewitz declared, gesticulating in a flamboyant manner that must have signified Italy in his mind. “A Lewitz speciality, children, just you wait!”

  *

  From the kitchen, which was spattered with sauce marks up to the ceiling, Capestan heard Merlot’s booming voice:

  “And still they insist on wearing those wretched frilly numbers! When will they move onto swimsuits, for the love of God?”

  “They’re already in swimsuits . . .” came Évrard’s response.

  “Yes, but with gowns on top!”

  Rosière was scraping the plates into the bin before loading them into the dishwasher.

  “We’re not having much joy with those files from Diament, are we. Same with Melonne,” she said, without breaking her rhythm.

  “No, we’re wasting time. We’ll need to put the whole of Rufus’s career under the microscope. That would settle the organised crime matter, not to mention the possibility of collusion. I will ask Buron for more files, as well as the archives in Lyon. I’m not sure why, but I feel like my compass is pointing more to the south.”

  “Do you reckon he’ll give them to you?”