“So he has children?”
“Two boys and . . .”
Gilles put his hand over Claire’s mouth.
“Not that! I can’t . . . Besides, I really don’t give a damn.”
“You asked me, and I’m answering you. I’ll answer all your questions sincerely.”
“Tell me the rest, the essential part.”
“As you wish . . . Simon got here last fall. He felt lonely here, far away from his family. We very quickly became close. I didn’t immediately understand what was happening. At first I thought it was just a simple friendship . . .”
“Usually you talk to me about your friends, both men and women.”
“That’s true. And I never talked to you about him. Probably because I was also lying to myself. We began by having lunch together regularly, and then we had dinner, and . . .”
She decided to stop.
“Did you love him?” Gilles asked again.
Claire sensed that every word could be a poisoned blade.
“In a way . . . but not like you. Never. I told you that, you’re the love of my life. You mustn’t have any doubt about that. I have certainly never had any.”
“Is everything over since he left?”
“Yes. We haven’t seen each other again. But we write to each other now and then. It has become a friendship again.”
“A friendship?” Gilles grimaced, jerking his chin toward the telephone.
One word in the SMS had struck him more than all the others.
“For me, it’s no longer anything but friendship. So far as he’s concerned, I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”
“Did you feel bad when he left?”
“Yes and no. A little sadness, but also relief. I wanted to go back to a simpler life. Our life before.”
“Our life before . . .” he repeated.
He withdrew his hands from his wife’s. As if it could be that simple! Only now did he understand why he’d had so much trouble getting used to the idea that Claire might cheat on him. Despite his fine ideas, his determination to be tolerant and understanding, down deep he thought of fidelity like virginity. Once you’ve lost it, it’s forever. That earlier life no longer existed.
“You’ve never cheated on me before him?”
“No, never, Gilles, I swear.”
She tried to take his hands in hers again, but he didn’t let her.
“If he hadn’t left, would it have continued?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think so . . . Simon was staying only one year, he had to leave, it was always like that. I think that was precisely why . . . why I became infatuated. Because this thing had an end even before it began. It was only a parenthesis, Gilles.”
“A parenthesis . . . A loving parenthesis?”
“Yes.”
A tear rolled down Claire’s cheek.
“Forgive me. If I want to be sincere, I can’t say anything different.”
She put her hands on her husband’s face and pulled it closer to hers.
“I love you, Gilles. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
He watched the tears fall on the quilt. A quilt she had bought recently. Black-and-white, with words written in gray over one another: You and Me, Today, Tomorrow, Forever. He pulled away and stood up.
“I love you, I love you, I love you!” she cried. “This thing is over! Over!”
His telephone rang again. He rubbed his eyes and got to his feet. He felt dizzy, and had to lean on a rock.
After the confrontation with Claire, he’d felt a sudden need to get some fresh air, and he’d left the bedroom while his wife was continuing to declare her love for him. He’d left without slamming the door. What good would it do to yell and scream? That could calm his anger, not his sorrow.
He’d gotten into his car and started it up. Claire’s words kept echoing in his head: “This thing is over!” How could it be over when for him it had just begun?
CHAPTER 4
The metal shutters on abandoned stores groaned under the whipping of the wind. In downtown Perpignan, one shop out of four remained stubbornly closed, and for several months the Rue des Augustins had been driving up the statistics: here almost every other shop had gone out of business.
“It’s spooky here.”
Jacques Molina, a police lieutenant at the Perpignan police headquarters, lit a cigarette and pulled up the collar of his jacket.
“And it’s seriously cold.”
His colleague, Lieutenant François Ménard, looked up at the blue sky. The dull ochre façade of the Hôtel du Gecko was bathed in cold shade, but the sun kindly lent an illusion of spring to its red tile roof.
“Still no word from Gilles?”
Molina looked at his mobile.
“Still not, no.”
“He’s pushing it . . .”
Ménard pulled his hands out of his raincoat and rubbed them together.
“Don’t tell me that with this weather he’s escaping work to run on the trails.”
Molina smiled:
“When he has pins and needles in his legs, Gilles is capable of running in a storm. But if he does that when he’s on duty, he takes his phone with him so he can be contacted. This time I’ve sent him a message and two SMSes and I haven’t heard a word out of him.”
“He must be in an area where there’s no signal.”
“Tut . . . As long as he’s been running in Northern Catalonia, he knows every corner of the department and he wouldn’t go into an area without relays on a workday.”
“Well, then his battery is probably dead! No, really, he’s going too far. Already he doesn’t come in the morning and now he doesn’t respond to emergencies. He’s lucky to be in the boss’s good graces.”
Molina would have liked to defend his teammate, but he was out of arguments. He limited himself to pulling on his cigarette. Ménard glanced at his watch.
“2:45! It was hardly worth the trouble to hurry if we’re just going to stand around here.”
“I’ll finish my cig and then we’ll go.”
Half an hour earlier, a telephone call from headquarters had interrupted their lunch. After hearing gunshots, the manager of the Hôtel du Gecko had found a woman dead in one of the establishment’s rooms. The two lieutenants had hurriedly left the restaurant without taking time to drink their coffee. Their colleagues from the forensic police were already working on-site, but Molina and Ménard were waiting in the street for the—as yet hypothetical—arrival of a third policeman, Lieutenant Gilles Sebag, who had been unreachable since that morning.
Ménard kept an eye on Molina’s cigarette, which was almost entirely smoked.
“Shall we go?”
Molina knew that Sebag attached great importance to the first moments of an investigation. The first observations, the looks, the first interrogations, the hesitations, the emotion, the silences and the fear. “Ineffable truths float in the air for an instant,” Gilles often said. “If you don’t grasp them then, you never will.” Skeptical at first, Jacques had ended up being convinced that Sebag’s idea was correct. But he didn’t think this was the time to talk to Ménard about it. To remind him of these remarks was also to admit that in his opinion only Gilles was capable of gasping this truth. That would not be likely to improve his mood.
Ménard ran an exasperated hand through his crew cut.
“Shall we go?” he repeated.
Molina exhaled a final puff of smoke. Then he crushed out the butt on the asphalt.
“OK, OK! Let’s go.”
The two inspectors climbed the three steps that led to the lobby. They were about the same height, but Molina had retained a massive physique from his years as a second-row rugby player. With time, he had gained in fat what he had lost in muscle. They nodded to the policeman in uniform who was blockin
g access to the stairway.
The Hôtel du Gecko was a reputable but rather run-down establishment. Black-and-white photos of Perpignan in the early twentieth century hung on faded green wallpaper. The frames seemed to have been placed randomly, without any concern for aesthetics. The bald old man leaning on the reception desk fit right into this décor.
“Which room?” Molina asked, without any preliminaries.
“Room 34, on the fourth floor,” the old man replied in a toneless voice. “Top of the stairway, on the left.”
“There’s no elevator?”
The old man sighed with a slight shrug of his hunched shoulders. François Ménard took a little notebook out of his jacket pocket.
“Hello, sir. Your name is . . . ?”
“Jordi Estève, Inspector. I’ve been the owner of this hotel since 1975.”
Molina snorted.
“You could have changed the wallpaper at least once!”
“We do that regularly,” the hotel owner replied, offended. “Unfortunately, the building is damp—a construction defect—and the wallpaper doesn’t last long. And since lately there haven’t been many guests . . .”
“One thing explains the other.”
“And vice versa.”
Ménard coughed. These digressions annoyed him.
“Are you the one who called the police?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Tell us exactly what happened.”
Old Jordi rubbed his forehead with his rough palm. The top of his skull was spotted with the same reddish patches as the back of his hand. Molina remembered the summer of ’75 when his uncle’s peach orchard in Vinça had been infected by black scab. In a few days, the fruit and leaves were studded with similar stigmata. A whole harvest went into the refuse bin, a catastrophe. Jacques was still just a kid and he remembered well that this was the first time he’d seen an adult cry. Impressive. He was still marked by that. A scab on his memory.
“I was in the restroom when I heard the shot,” the hotel owner explained. “I came out as fast as I could and was able to see a man rushing down the stairs like a demon. He was holding a long box at his side. I think it was a rifle. He saw me, but he didn’t stop. I was really scared.”
Ménard was taking all this down in his notebook.
“What did this man look like?”
“Well . . . about fifty. Pretty tall, not fat but a little heavyset. Rather long hair, blond, and still fairly thick.”
Ménard stopped writing for a moment.
“What do you mean, ‘a little heavyset?’”
“Well . . . he had a small potbelly and broad, even very broad, shoulders, but you could see that he didn’t have as much muscle beneath them as your partner there does.”
Molina thanked him with a nod of his head.
“But you couldn’t really say that he was fat,” Jordi added.
“And you’d never seen him before?” Ménard went on.
“Never. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Could you recognize him?”
“I think . . .”
“When the man came out, what did you do?”
“Well, I went up to the fourth floor, room 34.”
“Why that room in particular?”
Molina and the old man glanced at each other.
“Well . . . there weren’t many guests at that time of day,” the hotel owner said evasively. “Besides, whatever the hour, we don’t have a lot of guests.”
“And what did you find up there?”
Jordi Estève hesitated. He didn’t want to remember.
“Uhh . . . Your colleagues are already there, they can tell you. And then you’ll see for yourself if you go up.”
François Ménard put down his pencil and glared at the owner of the Gecko.
“Nonetheless, I’d like you to tell me, Monsieur Estève . . .”
The old man took a deep breath.
“The lady was sitting down. There was blood on her blouse. I went up to her but I quickly realized that she was dead. I went back down to the reception desk to call you.”
“Was she the only one occupying the room?”
“No, she came with her . . . friend.”
Another exchange of glances between the hotel owner and Molina.
“But he was no longer there when the killing took place?”
“No, I’d seen him leave about ten minutes earlier.”
Ménard underlined the last words he had just written.
“Who was occupying room 34? Do you have the couple’s name?”
“Monsieur and Madame Durand.”
“Durand . . . Are you sure?” Ménard said, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s what they told me . . . But as you know, we are no longer required to ask our guests to show their identity papers.”
“Did they pay the bill?”
“Yes. The gentleman paid on his way out.”
“Do you have a credit card receipt?”
“The gentleman always paid cash.”
Ménard frowned. He moistened his finger to turn a page in his notebook.
“Had they been there for several days? Were they tourists?”
The old man’s dried-out lips stretched out. His smile uncovered a row of well-aligned but rotting teeth.
“The gentleman always paid cash.”
“So they were regulars . . .”
Molina put his big hands on the counter and tapped the false marble with his fingers.
“They usually came twice a week,” old Jordi explained. “Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
Ménard carefully noted down all this information. Molina sighed and decided to speed up the interview.
“They arrived at noon and never spent the night, right?”
“I don’t spy on my guests,” the old man replied. “They always paid for the night.”
“But they had no luggage, never had breakfast, and you never saw them in the morning, right?”
Jordi Estève lowered his eyes as if he felt guilty of something.
“That’s right.”
“Some tourists have odd habits,” Molina laughed.
Ménard stopped writing.
“You don’t think . . .”
“No, I don’t think, I’m sure! A couple cheating on their spouses, that was obvious from the beginning.”
“Sometimes you have to be wary of what seems obvious. Your friend Gilles often says that, doesn’t he?”
“That’s true. But he’s never challenged the universal laws of gravity: two people who rent a room in a shabby hotel between noon and 2 o’clock are not there for tourism, they’re there to screw. That’s all there is to it. Feel free to go on believing in Santa Claus if you want, but I’d prefer that you do it when you’re off duty.”
Jordi Estève lifted an outraged finger and his face was getting red. But in an argument, as earlier on the rugby field, it wasn’t easy to stop Jacques Molina once he got going.
“Yeah, I know, old pal . . . You don’t like me saying that your hotel is shabby. Excuse me, but I’m the kind of guy who calls a spade a spade.”
“This used to be a fine hotel!” the owner moaned.
“I’m perfectly willing to believe you, but that was then, as people say. Before the war. But which one?”
Molina grabbed the owner’s still-raised finger and put it on the counter.
“At ease, soldier! Anything else you want to tell us, my dear Jordi? I mean anything else useful for our investigation?”
“Off the top of my head, no, not at the moment.”
Molina jerked his chin toward the stairway and turned to Ménard.
“Are you going up, dear?”
Without waiting for an answer, Molina started up the stairs.
“St
op, Jacques. What are you doing there?”
Elsa Moulin, the new head of the forensic team, rushed over to Molina to keep him from coming into room 34. She took off her mask and put her plastic-gloved hand on her colleague’s broad chest.
“Are you crazy? We haven’t finished, you’re going to mess up the crime scene!”
“Relax, nina . . . I wasn’t going to come in like that, I know the ropes. I remind you that I was a policeman long before you got your first period. Give me shoe covers and gloves and everything will be fine. You know that we like to have a glance at crime scenes right away.”
Elsa looked behind Jacques and saw François Ménard coming down the fourth-floor hall.
“Isn’t Gilles with you?”
“He’s disappeared without a trace.”
“But he’s working today, right?”
“In theory.”
She went back into the room and came out with a box containing complete kits. Molina took out a pair of gloves and plastic shoe covers and put them on.
“Put on the cap, too,” Elsa insisted.
“Give me a break, I hate those things. A guy looks so stupid in them.”
“The television crew isn’t here and there’s nobody for you to hit on here, so nobody cares if you look stupid.”
“Nobody to hit on, nobody to hit on . . . That’s easy to say.”
He looked at her with a winning smile. She had on the usual outfit worn by the forensic team, a white jumpsuit that covered her from head to toe. He gently put the mask back over her mouth.
“I think a fantasy is being born. I don’t know whether it’s you or just the outfit . . .”
The young woman put her hands on her hips and looked at him with pity.
“You know, you try this on me every time! Are you getting senile, or what?”
“And what do you say back to me?” Molina asked, undaunted.
“That if it’s the outfit that excites you I can arrange something for your next conquest, but if it’s me, I’ll give you a piece of advice: Forget about it.”
Crimes of Winter Page 2