Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  “When and how did you find out?”

  Abad pursed his lips and blushed.

  “That same morning. I sneaked a look at her mobile phone and found an SMS that left no doubt.”

  Sebag felt an icy wave cause his stomach to contract, and his mind disconnected. Don’t think anymore, definitely don’t think. Molina, who had not divined anything, picked up the file folder next to his keyboard and flipped through it. He quickly found what he was looking for. As usual, Ménard had done a good job. He was a first-class pain in the ass, but his files were always irreproachable. Molina reread the transcript of the SMS Christine had sent to her lover on the morning of the day of the murder. The only one they’d found on the mobile phone.

  “What did that SMS that you found say?” he asked Abad.

  “Uhh . . . I don’t quite recall. Something like: ‘I love you, I’m waiting for you.’”

  Molina reread what he had before his eyes: “I can’t wait to feel you inside me. See you soon.” That was close enough.

  “Anything else?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “When exactly did you discover this message?”

  “Around 8:30, before leaving for work.”

  Molina consulted the timeline Ménard had drawn up. Christine had sent her SMS to Balland at 7:46.

  “And you left as if nothing was wrong?”

  “Yes. Well, almost. Except that I took my rifle with me.”

  “You already intended to kill her?”

  Again, Abad blushed.

  “Uhh . . . I don’t know.”

  Sebag suddenly reconnected with the conversation. As if he had heard a mute signal of alarm.

  “And why didn’t you kill your wife as soon as you discovered the SMS?” Molina asked.

  Abad’s eyes flicked away toward the window. He was contemplating the roofs of the buildings across the way, the blue sky, or the past. Sebag held out his hand over the desks. Molina passed him the page that mentioned the SMS.

  “I . . . I don’t know. I . . . I wanted to be sure,” Abad tried to answer. “I think I needed to see them together.”

  Molina held his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

  “But you didn’t see them together.”

  “I was there when they got there, and they came together!”

  The surveillance cameras had filmed the lovers’ arrival at the Hôtel du Gecko. Molina remembered: they were in fact together. Everything was crystal clear.

  Sebag laid down the sheet of paper he’d just read and re-read. Then he asked his first question since the beginning of the interrogation.

  “I’m not sure I’ve understood: Could you tell me again what was in the text message that you intercepted?”

  Abad’s eyebrows frowned. Astonishment would have made them rise.

  “Well, I told you, it was simple: ‘I love you, I’m waiting for you.’”

  Gilles felt the icy wave pass through his stomach again. He closed his eyes. Had he found such precise, terrible words in the message on Claire’s mobile, he would never have been able to forget them: “I can’t wait to feel you inside me.” He opened his eyes again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It may not be word for word, but that was the gist of it. In any case, it left me no doubt.”

  Abad’s tone had hardened and he was breathing faster. Uneasiness or irritation, maybe a little of both. Sebag went over in his memory what had been said during this interview. What he had heard and what he had grasped despite himself during the brief instant when his mind had “absented itself.” A few points were worth clarifying.

  “How did you know where Christine and her lover were to meet?”

  Abad stopped breathing for a moment. Then he decided to be annoyed:

  “What’s with all these pointless questions? It was mentioned in the goddamn text message, that’s all.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Something like ‘I’ll be waiting for you at 12:30 at the Hôtel du Gecko.’”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that earlier?”

  “Because it didn’t seem important to me.”

  Sebag and Molina exchanged a glance. Jacques looked surprised.

  “I don’t know any more, I’m tired,” Abad explained. “I haven’t slept or eaten for two days. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “The problem is that it doesn’t correspond at all to the SMS that we found.”

  Sebag handed him the transcript that was in the file.

  “Then it was in another message,” Abad replied after having skimmed the text. One she erased afterward, of course. You can trust that tramp to be careful.”

  “You know that we can recover everything that was erased from your wife’s phone?”

  For just a moment—a second, no longer—a glint of arrogance shone in Abad’s pupils.

  “Then why haven’t you already done it?”

  “Because it’s still complicated and hasn’t seemed necessary up to this point.”

  Abad snorted.

  “Then do it. Why would I care? I killed my wife, I confessed, what more do you want?“

  “The truth, Monsieur Abad.”

  “I’ve already told you the truth: I killed my wife, I waited for her lover to leave and then I went into that fucking hotel. I opened the door to the room, I saw her, and I didn’t give her time to say a word, I aimed straight at her heart. I didn’t hesitate for a second, I wanted to kill her and I did it. You have all the proof you need against me and you have my confession. Charge me, put me in jail, and let’s get this over with!”

  Sebag waited patiently until Abad’s anger abated, and then turned to his partner.

  “If you have other questions . . .”

  This sudden passing of the baton disconcerted Molina.

  “Uhh . . . Yes, I had at least one. I remember that one thing surprised Ménard and me when we were viewing the surveillance tapes . . .”

  He turned to Abad:

  “When Éric Balland—your wife’s lover—left the hotel, you kept waiting. At least ten minutes, if I remember correctly. Why?”

  Abad’s face relaxed.

  “I wanted to give Christine a chance . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we were younger and more . . . in love, she liked to smoke a cigarette alone after sex. It was the sign that she was happy.”

  Sebag looked at Abad. Something indefinable had changed in his attitude. Here he was telling the truth again, that was certain.

  Molina clarified:

  “If I understand correctly, you wanted to know if your wife was happy with her lover?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s because she was happy that you killed her?”

  “Yes.”

  A leaden silence fell over the room, disturbed only by the sound of Molina’s fingers tapping on his computer’s keyboard.

  Gilles rose and went out to drink another glass of water. He felt disconcerted. Physically ill at ease and intellectually perplexed. Something wasn’t working. Stéphane Abad had lied to them. About a detail, yes, but he’d lied.

  Why?

  He drank another cup of water. This murder might turn out to be more interesting than anticipated, or was it just that he, Gilles Sebag, a perceptive cop but a cuckolded husband, was dreaming of an exciting investigation that would distract him from his own troubles? He crushed the paper cup, threw it in the trash, and returned to the office. Jacques had wound up this first interrogation and was putting handcuffs on the presumed murderer.

  “You’re going to spend the night in custody,” he explained. “We’ll want to talk to you again tomorrow. And we will give you a chance to confront the witnesses. Then you’ll go before the examining magistrate, who will indict you for premeditated
murder, that is, murder in the first degree. Between you and me, a murderer who expresses no regrets is likely to get fifteen to twenty years.”

  Abad’s mouth twisted in amazement.

  “But she cheated on me!”

  “There’s no doubt about that.”

  “I’m . . . I’m the victim!”

  “On that point, I advise you to change your story. It no longer works like that these days.”

  “You’re just trying to scare me . . . They’ll have to grant that there were extenuating circumstances!”

  Molina’s face clearly showed his skepticism.

  “Society is changing, Monsieur Abad. There was a time, for example, when alcoholism was, for any crime whatever, an extenuating circumstance. Today that is not only no longer the case, but it has become an aggravating circumstance. And you see, I increasingly have the impression that the same shift is happening with regard to jealousy. Everything will probably depend on the makeup of the jury. For your sake, I hope there will be a lot of faithful spouses on the jury. But to judge by the surveys that have appeared in women’s magazines, adultery has long since become common in France.”

  He put his big paw on Abad’s shoulder and pushed him toward the door. While Jacques was taking the husband to a cell, Gilles remained alone in the room. He opened his desk drawer and took out the whiskey bottle. One swig, just one. This interrogation had worn him out.

  “Case closed,” Jacques concluded as he came back into the room. He collapsed in his chair and put his feet on the desk.

  “Hmm,” Sebag grumbled. “Just how long have you been reading women’s magazines?”

  “Never have. It was just a way of speaking, something that fit well in the sentence! But as for the survey, it’s true, I heard about it on the radio the other morning: more than one man out of two admits having been unfaithful, and almost one woman out of three. In the makeup of a jury, that could turn out to be important.”

  “True.”

  “And by the way, what was that ‘hmm’ supposed to mean?”

  “What ‘hmm?’”

  “When I came back and said ‘case closed’ you answered, ‘hmm.’”

  “Right. Hmm.”

  “Is it this business about the SMS that’s bothering you?”

  “Among other things . . . Abad isn’t believable, regarding either the form or the content. According to the owner of the Gecko, the two lovers regularly went to his hotel. Their text messages no longer needed to say where they were going to meet. Especially since in that kind of correspondence, people always get straight to the point.”

  “Don’t tell me you have doubts about Abad’s guilt? The owner of the hotel identified him in the photos, the surveillance cameras filmed him going into and coming out of the hotel, he confessed, and we have the murder weapon . . .”

  Sebag stopped him with a gesture.

  “No, I have no doubts, of course.”

  “Then we’re not going to worry about details.”

  “I like details. It’s odd, after all, that a murderer who confesses everything and declares loud and strong that he regrets nothing hides things from us, even if they’re only details. You saw how he reacted when I pestered him about that SMS: He got mad and launched into a long diatribe proclaiming his guilt.”

  “Do you really think he’s not telling the truth?”

  “Hard to say. I’m not sure myself.”

  “Then we’ll have to make the victim’s mobile give up everything that’s in it.”

  “That’s still a complicated procedure, and I’m not sure that the prosecutor will authorize us to carry it out.”

  Molina clapped his hands.

  “You know what?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “We’re really stupid sometimes!”

  “I’m willing to believe that, but why?”

  “We can just call the lover. A message always exists in two places: the telephone that sends it and the one that receives it!”

  Sebag bit his lip.

  “You’re right, we’re really stupid!”

  Molina picked up his desk phone and dialed Éric Balland’s number. The first exchanges were tense; the lover wasn’t exactly pleased to be disturbed at home on Christmas Day for this kind of question. But with a few quick, well-chosen words Jacques made him more cooperative. After asking the policemen to wait a few seconds, long enough to move out of his family’s earshot, Balland finally answered:

  “I’ve erased everything, as you might imagine. I always did that as I went along.”

  After confirming that he and Christine had long since stopped mentioning the place of their usual rendezvous, he added:

  “As I told you yesterday, it was never a question of love between Christine and me. We never said ‘I love you,’ and still less wrote it. If in my position I can be permitted a comment, Abad is putting you on!”

  A glass in his hand, Sebag was still going through the Abad file. Jacques had left some time before, and he was going to have to do the same. It was Christmas, after all. And then Claire and the children were to leave the next morning to spend the rest of the holiday with his in-laws.

  As he reread the last pages he was surprised by certain details. Something was wrong with the timing. He made comparisons. There was no doubt. There was a contradiction between Abad’s statements during his interrogation and the timelines drawn up during the investigation. The presumed murderer was lying about a second point.

  It was beginning to be too much.

  CHAPTER 14

  The sun was coming up and revealing a blue sky blown clear of clouds by the cold, dry breath of the tramontane. He crossed the deserted intersection. Across from him the Ferris wheel put up for the holidays was silently challenging the red bricks of the Castillet, its lighted cabins being slightly higher than the immobile, crenellated towers of the ancient fortified gate. All around the idle merry-go-round, a white-flocked décor imitated the snow that seldom ventured down from the summits to the plain.

  He was walking at a pace eased by a long exercise session. On the Quai Vauban, the Christmas market’s wooden stands had not yet opened their shutters. The owner of a bar was already setting out tables and chairs on the street and, respectful of his uniform, he greeted him with a nod of the head.

  He swaggered. He was proud.

  Proud as he had no longer been for months. For years, maybe. Since the shock. It had been such a long time.

  Now everything was going well.

  Stéphane Abad had turned himself in, he’d passed the night in police custody. Today, or tomorrow at the latest, he would be indicted for murder and then locked up. According to his information, the police hadn’t asked many questions about it.

  The perfect crime. Really.

  For the past two days he’d felt better. His fears were becoming less intense. Even those that he felt on leaving for work in the morning and on returning home in the evening. He was regaining his appetite, his taste for life. Last night he’d slept at least six hours.

  After the Quai Vauban, he took the Quai Nobel. Down below, on the left, the Basse flowed clear and quiet in its concrete channel. He paused. Leaning on the brick guardrail, he looked down on the river that ran between two strips of grass that were improbably green for the Mediterranean area. He closed his eyes, breathed, listened. The calm city allowed the river’s murmur to bloom

  He took another deep breath, raised his head, reopened his eyes.

  Across from him, on the other side of the Basse, the consular palace flaunted its pretentious architecture over five stories and a surface of more than four thousand square meters. The seat of the chamber of commerce, the building had been for sale for months without finding a buyer. One couldn’t imagine a better symbol of a local economy in complete collapse.

  He started walking again, lengthening his stride.
He didn’t want to be late. And especially not to make himself noticed. Neither by his colleagues nor by his superiors. Anonymous among the anonymous, that was his motto.

  More than ever, he had to remain vigilant. He mustn’t make any mistakes. The Eye’s first exploit had been successful. The work continued.

  There was a price to be paid for this tragedy that had struck him. Yes, this tragedy had a price.

  He alone knew who was going to pay the bill

  And it would be a big one.

  His vengeance was just beginning.

  CHAPTER 15

  Good-bye, kids! Have a good time at Grandpa and Grandma’s!”

  Gilles was trying to be upbeat but Claire wasn’t fooled. The day before he’d come home from work with his shoulders proudly thrown back and his mind healthily preoccupied by his current investigation.

  But that hadn’t lasted.

  During the meal, she’d seen his posture change. His back had perceptibly sagged under the weight of dark thoughts. His demons had taken control of him again, and he had turned inward on himself, participating only mechanically in the family conversation.

  As they got into bed, she’d feared that further questions would come up. But Gilles had resisted the temptation. He’d lain down next to her in the bed, and to her great astonishment, she had very soon heard his breathing slow.

  In the middle of the night a sound had awakened her, a sound she couldn’t at first identify. She reached out, but she was alone in the bed. Gilles had gotten up. She looked at the clock.

  2:23 A.M.

  She heard the sound again. Clear and crystalline. A bottle set on the glass coffee table in the living room.

  Gradually she fell back asleep. She’d awakened again later in the night. She hadn’t dared move or look at the clock. Gilles was getting into the bed. She felt the cold outside slip under the quilt. This time, she was the one who cuddled up to him. Her husband’s heavy, hoarse snoring rocked her back to sleep.

  Gilles hugged Séverine and kissed her tenderly. Then he held out the flat of his hand to his son. Léo slapped it and then they did a fist bump. For more than a year, that had been the only physical contact between them. Léo had put an end to cuddles and even to kisses, so Gilles had come up with this young male ritual that his son was comfortable with.