“Uhh . . . No.”
“So it’s more serious that I thought!”
The interview with the lawyer, a puny little four-eyes, simply supported Stéphane Abad’s refusal to answer the policemen’s questions. So the latter decided there was no reason to continue the interrogation. Accompanied by Ménard, who had insisted on coming along, Sebag handed the presumed murderer over to the court.
Gilles told the prosecutor, Kazatzky, about their interrogations. The skeptical and haughty look in the magistrate’s eyes made Gilles wonder how substantial his suspicions really were. Ménard didn’t help him; he remained silent, refusing to step up to the plate. Comfortably settled in a large chair, Hector Kazatsky was looking the two lieutenants up and down, despite his short stature.
“What exactly are you asking for?”
Sebag mentioned the examination of the victim’s mobile phone, which he still wanted done, the interrogation of Abad’s co-workers at Cantalou, in order to clarify the timetable, and another review of the city’s surveillance tapes.
“And then, we could also search his house,” he added.
“What precisely would you be looking for?”
“When you do a search, you never know exactly what you’re looking for, but sometimes . . . you find it!”
Sebag was well aware that his argument was not pertinent. He’d drunk too much wine at lunch and was having a hard time resisting a terrible desire to yawn. Hector Kazatzky took off his glasses and scratched the sides of his nose with the bows. He thought a long time before putting his glasses down on the black desk blotter.
“I’ll authorize another review of the videotapes and the examination of the victim’s mobile. But regarding the rest, you and I have other things to do, don’t we?”
He abruptly stood up to conclude the interview.
“We have the murderer, the weapon, the mobile, the confessions, and all the proof. That’s enough for me. You’ve done a good job on this case; the file is perfect.”
They handed their prisoner over to the two policemen assigned to take him away to the detention center, and then returned to police headquarters, where Molina had decided to celebrate, twenty-four hours early, his departure on vacation. A few colleagues were already drinking with him in their office. When Sebag and Ménard arrived, Jacques opened another bottle of Cava, a sparkling wine made on the other side of the Pyrenees. The cork popped. A vice cop pretended to jump and pulled out his gun as if to return fire. The gag was an old one, but a few people nonetheless laughed.
Molina did not ask them a single question about their interview with the magistrate. He, too, considered the Abad case closed. Like the magistrates. Ménard had promised to review the videotapes on Monday, while Sebag would take the victim’s mobile to the head of the forensic team as soon as she returned from vacation. And then . . . Insh’Allah. He’d done his job, and in his own view he was morally covered.
The police and the judicial system had defects, routines, and weaknesses that resulted from their lack of time and resources, and also sometimes from their lack of desire or competence. Sebag knew that he wasn’t up to doing battle. To avoid getting lost in this job, you had to recognize your limits, and he had long since identified his. He defined himself as a “conscientious loafer”: too conscientious to be satisfied with his laziness, but too lazy to move mountains all by himself. Come what might. He’d tried to be a perfectionist, and no one had listened to him. Now he could just wash his hands of this case.
6“Good day, everyone.”
7Pork cheeks.
8A sweet wine from Banyuls, in Pyrénées-Orientales.
CHAPTER 17
Sprawled on the living room couch, Gilles was drinking from the whiskey bottle. Before coming home, he’d stopped at shop near police headquarters and was advised to try a strong single malt. Ardbeg-something-or-other, he couldn’t pronounce the name. A Scotch from the windy islands, peaty, spicy, and woody. The stuff’s alcohol content was supposed to exceed fifty-four percent, enough to warm hearts and minds even in the depths of winter.
The blues CD he’d put in the stereo had long since stopped, and a profound silence reigned in the room, disturbed from time to time by the hum of the refrigerator and, outside, the wail of the wind. Gilles had turned off all the lamps in the house. Only the spotlights on the terrace were still on. The shadows of the palm trees shaken by the wind were dancing like merry phantoms on the living room walls.
Damn, this Scotch was really good!
Gilles was making his way through a thick mist arising from the malty sea spray of the Highlands. Nothing was important anymore, he could accept it all: this job he was tired of, his children who were going away, Claire’s betrayal, the love that was withering.
A noise yanked him out of his limbo, a loud and repeated rustling. He slowly turned his head toward the sliding glass door and saw a tiny, furry silhouette scratching the window. The animal stopped when it saw that it had been spotted. It sat down, patiently, on its haunches. Two green eyes were fixed on Sebag. Slowly, he struggled to get up from the couch and ended up on the floor. He got on his knees. He felt as weak and wretched as someone half-paralyzed after thirty-six hours of Telethon. He put one hand on the couch and the other on the coffee table and managed to get to his feet.
He slid the glass door open and let the animal in. It was a tomcat that belonged to their neighbor, a crazy old woman. The preceding summer the cat had already kept him company when Claire, Léo, and Séverine had each gone on vacation alone. Had abandoned him. The cat rubbed against the bottom of his pants leg and started purring.
“So you’re back, pal. You at least haven’t forgotten me.”
Gilles opened the fridge and took a piece of leftover guinea fowl out of a plastic container. He put it on a plate that he set on the coffee table.
“Merry Christmas.”
The cat looked at him for a moment—Gilles imagined that he was surprised—before leaping on the meat. He held it with his paw as he tore at it. Sebag sat down on the couch again and picked up the bottle.
“Here’s to ya, cat.”
He took a long drink and then had another look at the level of the liquid still in the bottle. It had gone down by a good third. He was drinking too much, that was for sure. He smiled as he remembered the bill. He’d paid a small fortune for this Ardbeg. There was no danger that he’d end up with cirrhosis: this Scotch was so expensive he’d have to empty his bank account and sell his house long before he became an alcoholic.
“Merry Christmas, cat.”
He lost himself in the contemplation of the feline devouring its banquet. He could no longer connect one sentence with the next. And it was just as well. He must have dozed off for a while. A moment or an hour. He no longer had any notion of time.
It was late. Or else early. He didn’t give a shit.
He reopened his eyes when a hairy mass came to lie down at his side, imitating the rumbling of a fuel-oil furnace. With his hand on the warm, vibrating fur, he sank into a deeper sleep.
He woke up shivering. Claire, his father, in the same room, the same bed, united in a single movement. Fucking nightmare! And so obvious . . . You didn’t have to be a shrink to interpret its meaning. So Gérard Sebag would always come back to haunt him. Ten years at least since he’d seen him. Maybe he was dead? No, surely not. Gilles was an only son, a notary would have come to find him. In addition to bad memories, old Gérard certainly also had debts to bequeath to him.
He felt cold.
He crept over to the sliding glass door, which he’d forgotten to close. The cat had taken the opportunity to clear off. He’d paid for his feast with a quick caress, quid pro quo, that was life.
There was no free lunch.
Sebag turned off the lights on the terrace. The night invaded the room. He turned the lights back on. For the first time in ages, he was afra
id of the dark.
The dark, silence, solitude, and death.
Carefully, he made his way over to the stereo and put the blues CD back in. No need to change it, he’d hardly heard it.
Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar spread through the living room. A little life, a little soul. He stretched out on the couch and took a few more swigs. He had to do something for this headache.
He was alone. Alone to cope with life.
For years he’d followed his children’s growing up with a combination of pride and pain. He’d identified that danger, feared it, and had been preparing himself for it. The other one had stabbed him in the back. Naturally, he’d thought about it often enough but had never really believed it was possible.
“Not that, not us,” he’d often said to himself.
“Not that, not us,” he’d been repeating to himself, incredulous, for four days.
“Not that, not us,” the litany rang in his mind today like a death knell.
Sebag accepted the obvious. Whatever you say, whatever you do, whatever you experience, you remain alone.
Hopelessly alone.
Definitively alone.
Fragile, cowardly hearts, people surrounded themselves with families, thinking they were building a continent. All they created was an illusion. We remain icebergs clinging to each other, shivering, and at the slightest storm, the slightest temptation, we resume our perpetual drift across a frosty ocean.
He took another swig of whiskey and expressed his desperation in a solemn burp.
CHAPTER 18
Lieutenant Julie Sadet was walking at a brisk pace to warm herself up. She’d raised the collar of her overcoat and pulled her hat down over her ears, but the wind was still slapping her nose, eyes, and lips. The weather had grown cooler over the last weekend, and winter, real winter, had arrived. Thanks to the wind, blue skies still prevailed over the plain, but the peaks of the Pyrenees were disappearing behind a mantle of dark clouds. It was finally snowing in the high country, and the ski resorts, which hadn’t had enough snow at the beginning of the school vacations, were delighted. Julie was, too. As soon as the students and teachers had gone back to school, she herself would go to hurtle down the snowy slopes.
When she got to police headquarters, she asked the policemen on duty what had happened over the weekend. Apart from Stéphane Abad’s arrest, it was pretty quiet, they told her. Five pickpockets, two drunks, a disturbance of the peace, and a brawl in a bar on Saturday night. It was rare, but it did sometimes happen that delinquents also respected the trêve des confiseurs.9
Then Julie went to look for Sebag in the headquarters cafeteria, a fancy name for three tables and about a dozen stools set up at one end of a hallway across from a vending machine. Since Molina was on vacation with his sons, Julie was supposed to team up with Gilles all week. A first since her arrival in Perpignan. She hoped to get a lot out of it.
“What can I get for you?” Sebag asked her.
His voice had an unusual cavernous sound; it seemed to come from an endless night. As she climbed onto a high stool, Julie wondered if Gilles hadn’t taken advantage of his family’s absence and his temporary freedom to engage in all kinds of excesses and follies. But that wasn’t his kind of thing.
“Coffee, black without sugar, please.”
Gilles put some coins in the machine, which snorted as noisily as a tank running on diesel. He handed her a cup and got himself a coffee. When he perched on a stool beside her, Julie expressed her astonishment.
“You’re drinking coffee here? I thought you found it disgusting . . .”
“There are times when you have no choice. The Carlit is closed for the week.”
He wet his lips with the black, steaming liquid.
“I repeat: It’s disgusting! If I’d known . . . The next time, I’ll arrange to take my vacations when Rafel does!”
“You’ve never considered buying an espresso machine for your office?”
“My children wanted to get me one, but I dissuaded them: I’d drink too much.”
Julie scrutinized her colleague. His face was wan, his features tired, and he had big bags under his watery eyes—he must be coming down with something. In his sepulchral voice Gilles told her about the interrogations of Abad, the shadowy areas, the questions, and then the indictment for murder in the first degree. “Curious . . .” was the only commentary she thought it wise to make out loud. It had the advantage of being sober, she thought to herself.
Sober . . . the word made her smile at the obvious fact.
Gilles wasn’t coming down with anything, he wasn’t sick, he had a raging hangover. That’s all. Molina had probably taken his partner, a temporary bachelor, on one of his infamous bar crawls.
Gazing into his coffee cup, Gilles seemed to be wondering what he was going to do. Finish his coffee or throw it directly into the trash bin.
“Add a little salt,” she suggested.
“Do you think it would be better?”
“No. But it’s good, they say, for the morning after.”
In reply he stuck out his tongue at her.
“Yuck, that’s horrible!” she laughed.
Then Gilles and Julie went back to their respective offices. Like all French cops, no matter what they were doing at the moment, they always had masses of paperwork. The morning stretched calmly on, and Julie had time to go home at noon to have a quick lunch tête-à-tête. But the meal was cut short by a call from headquarters. Some guy had fallen from the sixth floor of a building on the Rue Auguste Rodin, in the Saint-Martin neighborhood. According to firemen, he was in bad shape but still breathing.
Not being able to reach Sebag, Julie went to headquarters and found him dozing in his office, next to his mobile phone, which he had turned off. She shook him and told him about the situation. They went to the site together. The site of what? Of an accident, of an attempted murder, or of a suicide? That remained for them to determine.
In the parking lot at the foot of a six-story building, the policemen in uniform were trying to keep at a distance rubberneckers whose curiosity was valiantly resisting the icy gusts of the tramontane. Sebag raised his voice—which was even thicker than it had been that morning—and finally got the crowd to move back a few meters to let the firemen and the doctor from the emergency team work. The prestige of the uniform was not all that it used to be! People knew that the cops in uniform were only subordinates and they were now more willing to obey civilians.
Julie went up to the emergency team. The firemen were making a circle around the victim to hide him from the onlookers. Inside the perimeter thus established, one emergency doctor was bent over the body while another held the infusion bottle. Sitting near them a distraught woman wept silently. Julie tried to speak to her but got no response.
“She’s in shock,” the doctor holding the infusion bottle explained. “We gave her a sedative and we’re going to take her to the hospital with us. I think you’ll have to wait to question her.”
“And him? How is he?”
The doctor who was bent over the victim stood up and spoke in a low voice to keep the woman from hearing him.
“He’s in critical condition. He has sustained a severe cranial trauma and his spinal column has been affected. It would probably be better if he didn’t make it. If his heart gives out during the transfer, we won’t go to great lengths to resuscitate him.”
The two lieutenants turned back to the onlookers.
“Did anyone see something?” Julie shouted after noting that Gilles, lost in his thoughts, was not going to take the initiative.
In the crowd, three people timidly raised their hands. A mother carrying a baby in her arms, a retiree, and a kid about twelve with roller skates on. She motioned to them to come forward, entrusted the old man to Gilles, took the woman aside, and asked the teenager to wait.
After reco
rding the identities of their respective witnesses and taking down their statements, the two police officers turned to the kid. His name was Martí.
“So, Martí, what did you see?”
“I saw Monsieur Valls jump, Madame. But first I heard shouting. I was roller-skating in the parking lot, my grandmother gave me the skates for Christmas. I looked up: the shouts were coming from the Vallses’ apartment, and . . . I saw him put his leg over the railing on the balcony. He said something I didn’t hear, and then . . .”
The boy swallowed before going on, looking down at his feet:
“And then he jumped. He . . . bounced off the car, there, and landed on the ground.”
“What did you do then?”
He pointed to the two other witnesses.
“Nothing. The old gentleman and the lady came up. They spoke to Monsieur Valls and then telephoned. The firemen, I think.”
“And Madame Valls, did you see her?”
“She came down very quickly, she sat down next to Monsieur Valls and screamed. Then afterward there were lots of people around them and I didn’t see any more.”
“Do you know the Vallses?”
“A little. They’re nice, especially the lady. I live on the next street, but my grandmother is their neighbor, so I meet them sometimes when I come to see her.”
The boy’s statements corresponded exactly with what the earlier witnesses had said. Didier Valls, a forty-two-year-old accountant, married, without children, had jumped all alone from his balcony. Thus it was clearly an attempted suicide, unfortunate, to be sure, but commonplace.
“Thanks, Martí. You should go home now, this is not something you should see.”
Julie took a card out of her wallet and handed it to the boy.
“Here’s my number. If anything else occurs to you, you can call me. Don’t hesitate. And even if you don’t have anything special to say and you just want to talk about what happened, call me. It’s important, you know, to talk.”
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