Julie got up. Her eyes met Gilles’s and she saw that he approved.
Didier Valls’s heart did not give out on the way to the hospital, but the following night, during the operation that was supposed to reduce the bleeding of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife learned the news when she awoke the following morning, another terrible shock. The doctors gave her more sedatives to help her cope. In the hospital corridor, which stank of suffering as much as of chlorine, Julie Sadet and Gilles Sebag were sitting in front of the door to room 112, waiting for the medical team to give them the green light to talk with Sandrine Valls.
Julie saw that Gilles was dozing on his chair. He was still not in great shape.
“I’m disappointed,” she said softly.
Gilles opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, I’m disappointed. I was counting on taking advantage of this week to ask you to go running one of these evenings.”
Gilles sat up on his chair.
“Sorry. I’m a little tired. I’m not sleeping well just now.”
“Maybe you’re out of the habit of sleeping alone?”
“Probably.”
He rubbed a slight protuberance on his forehead. An old bump, apparently.
“In fact . . .” he began but then stopped. “In fact . . . I think I’m afraid of the dark.”
A smile flickered on Gilles’s lips but was contradicted by a voice that had sunk into an improbably low register. Julie hesitated. Was her colleague, usually so discreet, trying to help her out? The first thing that came into her mind was also the stupidest: “Do you want to talk about it?” The lethal weapon against confidences. She avoided the pitfall. Tried to find another way.
“Maybe you should try a different herbal tea . . .”
Gilles’s smile became more frank, but he avoided her eyes.
“So, you run?”
A sudden bifurcation. He’d changed the subject. Probably intentionally. Or else she had been mistaken about his state of mind.
“I haven’t had much time since I got to Perpignan, but I’m slowly getting back into it.”
“Did you run when you were working in Paris?”
“Almost every day, I worked nights and I needed that to decompress.”
“I can imagine . . . Where did you run in Paris?”
Julie felt her lips purse. Some memories were painful, even a year afterward . . .
“In the Buttes-Chaumont park. I loved that part of the capital. And you, where do you run?”
“Everywhere . . . On the beach, on the plain, in the hills. That’s the advantage of this department: the sea and the mountains, everything is close by. And on foot!”
Gilles’s voice was slowly coming back as he talked about running. It had taken on relief, a semblance of gaiety.
“So when shall we run?” Julie asked.
“Uhh . . . As you said, one of these evenings!”
Gilles had been staring at her for a few seconds. The young woman felt that he was wondering about the nature of her proposal. Why couldn’t relations between men and women be simpler, more direct, without the perpetual misunderstanding? She knew that some people at police headquarters were already wondering about her and that one day, everything would necessarily become known. She wasn’t afraid of the truth but she knew that many of her colleagues would no longer see her the same way afterward.
“Nothing like a little running to get back on track physically and mentally,” Gilles said.
Another helping hand, Julie said to herself. But she didn’t have time to wonder how to deal with this one, because a young doctor in a white smock was coming up to them.
“I believe you want to talk to Madame Valls? I’m going to see if that’s possible now.”The doctor went into room 112 and came out two minutes later. During that time, Gilles had regained his composure: he’d taken out his mobile and was reading his messages.
“She’s waiting for you,” the doctor finally said. “But take it easy. She’s still in shock.”
“Don’t worry,” Julie reassured him. “We have only a few simple questions. It’s only a matter of an attempt . . . I mean . . . of a suicide.”
Sandrine Valls’s face seemed to them paler than the walls of the room, whiter than the sheets on her bed. When she saw them coming in, she sat up in bed. And before they could greet her, she said to them:
“All this is my fault, and my fault alone.”
She began to sob. The two officers pulled up two chairs and placed them side by side. Julie decided to lead the conversation. Women speak to women . . .
“Tell us, Sandrine, why you think that it’s your fault?”
“I wanted to leave him. I’ve been wanting to tell him for a long time . . . I just couldn’t. He was often depressed. When he was doing badly, I didn’t want to add to his suffering, and when he was feeling better, I was afraid of making him fall into depression again. But then yesterday we had it out. He got angry, and so did I, and I said some painful things, much too painful. I had never imagined that he would go that far, I don’t know what I would have done had I known, but of course I would have acted differently. I didn’t want that, I didn’t want him to die, I didn’t want to kill him, I didn’t want . . .”
Sandrine’s forearm was outside the white sheet. Julie put her hand on it and caressed it gently.
“Of course you didn’t want that . . .”
“It was because of me that he jumped. I’m the one who killed him.”
“No, no, you’re not responsible, Sandrine. He and he alone made that choice. You’ve already said that you couldn’t guess that he would do that.”
“I should have! Over the past few days I’d noticed that he was particularly down. I was selfish. We’ve been living together for fifteen years, I should have been able to tell that he could do something foolish, I should have foreseen it. When you’ve loved someone such a long time, you ought to know him well enough to keep things like this from happening!”
“And you didn’t love him anymore? Is that why you wanted to leave him, Sandrine?”
On her right, she saw Sebag move, but didn’t understand the message. Was she missing something, or did he just want to refocus the conversation on the course of events the preceding day? She decided it was useful to prolong the phase of lamentations. Maybe it wasn’t useful for the investigation, but it was certainly useful for Sandrine. The pain had to be expelled. She’d missed her calling, she said to herself. She should have been a social worker or a psychologist instead of a cop! Her taste for action had led her to decide otherwise.
“There was no longer anything between us,” Sandrine answered, sadly shaking her head. “We’d been sleeping in separate rooms for months! But he still loved me. In any case, that’s what he often told me, and even more often for the past few days. And it’s what he told me again just before he jumped . . .”
“What about you? You didn’t love him anymore?”
“It happened gradually, I didn’t see it coming. And then one day I understood!”
Gilles cleared his throat:
“One day?”
Sandrine turned her head toward him.
“About two months ago . . .”
“The day when you realized that you loved somebody else?”
Julie was astonished by this direct question. Visibly, Gilles was in a hurry to get down to the facts. Sandrine took a tissue from the rolling table next to her bed. She blew her nose. She ended up replying, but she addressed herself to Julie:
“Didier told me that he knew everything, that he knew that I had a lover. I’ve known Francis since last September, he’s the new head of my department. He immediately liked the way I worked and took me into his confidence. Not only in my work. Didier spent all his time belittling me. One day in early November, I was having lunch with F
rancis when he told me that he found me attractive. Up to that point I’d thought I had only respect and esteem for him, but then I realized that I was having stronger feelings. And above all, I understood that I no longer loved Didier.”
She put the used tissue on the table, next to a plastic pitcher. She poured herself a glass of water and took a swallow of it.
“But nothing ever happened with Francis. We saw each other from time to time outside work, at a restaurant, at the movies, and also at the beach. We kissed, but there was never anything else between us. I didn’t want to. First I had to leave Didier.”
Her plaintive tone took on a sudden firmness.
“I’m not that kind of woman.”
Julie felt that on her left Gilles was fidgeting again. This time he was right; it was time to move the conversation forward.
“And did something change yesterday? Something that triggered what happened?”
“Didier told me he knew everything. But he only thought he knew . . . He was convinced that I’d slept with Francis and he refused to believe me when I told him that nothing had happened—naturally, I didn’t mention the kisses . . . I got mad and told him that I was leaving him. Things quickly got out of hand, he’d been drinking, a lot, and I got scared: I thought he was going to hit me.”
Then Sandrine told them that she had packed a suitcase with her clothes while Didier gave full vent to his anger. He had started throwing the furniture around, first the television set and then the coffee table and the bookcase. Julie took notes. All that fit with the disorder they’d found in the apartment after the emergency team had taken the Valls couple to the hospital.
“He’d started drinking several days earlier,” Sandrine went on. “I realized that only when I saw the bottles all over the living room: they were almost all completely empty, when last month we’d gone to Spain to replenish our stock for the holidays. He screamed, he was really drunk, and he was saying incomprehensible things. He claimed to have known everything for a long time. ‘Everything.’ How could he know everything since nothing had happened!”
Her pain and her guilty feelings didn’t prevent her from being offended by what she considered an injustice. Gilles abruptly stood up, putting his hand in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Excuse me, an urgent call,” he explained before going out of the room.
When the door closed after him, Sandrine Valls continued her story:
“All at once, he stopped being angry and began crying. He told me that he loved me, that he had always loved me, and . . . and he went out on the balcony. He didn’t even threaten to jump, he didn’t even leave me time to do anything, to say something. He put his leg over the balustrade and disappeared. I heard a metallic sound.”
Her voice broke.
“The firemen told me that he fell first on a car parked in front . . . before landing on the parking lot.”
Sandrine sobbed. Julie got up to get the packet of tissues and handed it to her. She didn’t need to know more but she asked a few more purely formal questions to give Sandrine time to recover a semblance of calm.
She joined Gilles in front of the entrance to the hospital. A group of patients in pajamas were gathered around a large ashtray. They were all smoking. Gilles crushed out his cigarette butt.
“Since when do marathon runners smoke?” Julie joked.
“Only real athletes can know the true pleasure of a cigarette . . . Have you ever smoked after running?”
“No, never.”
“You should; it’s delicious. Even better than after sex.”
“Ah, I wouldn’t know about that. I stopped so long ago!”
Julie waited for Sebag to show his astonishment before adding with a laugh: “I mean: it has been a long time since I stopped smoking!”
“You scared me there for a moment . . .”
Gilles hesitated. Julie could see that he was going to ask the indiscreet question that all her colleagues were asking themselves.
“And so . . . you’ve got a boyfriend?”
She hesitated in turn. This might be the time. She knew that Gilles was capable of being discreet. But in the end she decided not to.
“Almost,” she replied, with a smile lurking at the corner of her mouth. Maybe I’ll tell you someday.”
“You’re not obliged to do that, I was just asking. Without any ulterior motive, I assure you.”
“I know. Faithful husband?”
“For the past twenty years.”
“Do such men still exist?”
“Have to think so.”
“And no regrets?”
“Almost none.”
He winked at her.
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you about that, too . . .”
Sebag was smiling but his eyes were veiled in gray mist. The time for confidences had not yet come. It wouldn’t be long.
“Do we have another emergency?”
“No, why?”
“You said you had an urgent call.”
“Ah, yes.”
Mechanically, he put his hand in the pocket where he kept his mobile.
“Uhh . . . It was my kids.”
“Nothing serious?”
“No, no . . . uhh . . . not really.”
“Then it wasn’t so urgent . . .”
“Is that a reproach, Lieutenant Sadet?”
“You left right in the middle of the drama, that wasn’t very comradely . . .”
“You’ll see when you have children. Mine are teenagers and they already have little need for their father. So for me, when they call, it’s always urgent to be there.”
9Lit., “the confectioners’ truce.” In France, the period between Christmas and New Year’s, when little is done.
CHAPTER 19
Oh, Gilles, are you ready?”
Claire’s voice brought him back to life. It came from afar, that voice. From the adjoining bathroom and from the depths of his nothingness. He slowly came to and realized that the same question had already been asked several times. At least three times.
Claire’s face appeared in the half-open door.
“Come on, you’re not yet dressed? Hurry up!”
Gilles was standing in front of the armoire in their bedroom, overcome by the range of possibilities. How should he dress for New Year’s Eve? He reached out to take a jacket. Pulled back. Too dark. He stroked the fabric of another jacket. Very soft. Pleasant. Too brightly colored.
“The range of possibilities,” he repeated half out loud.
“What did you say?”
Claire had disappeared into the bathroom again, where she was finishing getting ready.
“Nothing important. I was talking to myself.”
“Ah . . .”
Where did he come up with that expression? The range of possibilities. You’d think it came from math, philosophy, or even science fiction. A little of each of them, maybe.
He grabbed a gray jacket. He liked it for the four yellow buttons that decorated its sleeves at the wrist. Or the elbow. Because this jacket could be worn with the sleeves pushed up, which he particularly liked.
He was about to put it on when he realized that he was still naked as a jaybird. He put the jacket down on the bed and chose some shorts. As for the rest, it was so complicated . . .
“How do you want me to dress?” he shouted over the noise of a running faucet.
Claire came back into the bedroom. She was wearing a black satin dress that left her shoulders uncovered but enveloped her arms in embroidered muslin. She was almost ready. Dressed, made-up. All she needed now was a little touch of red lipstick. She looked at the jacket on the bed and took from the armoire an Imperial yellow shirt and a pair of pleated trousers in the same gray as the jacket.
“Do you want to wear a tie?”
“Why not?�
��
She put a cobalt blue tie on the jacket.
“Hurry, we’re going to be late.”
“Late, late . . . You always have to exaggerate. For New Year’s Eve you’re not late so long as it isn’t midnight.”
“That’s right . . . I’m not sure that Fanny and her roast would agree with you.”
“Ah, Fanny’s famous roast . . . Anyway, it’s always overcooked. This year she’ll have an excuse.”
A loud voice reached them from the living room.
“I’m leaving, Mom and Dad. Good-bye, see you tomorrow!”
“OK, son, we love you too! Kisses!”
Claire and the kids had come back from his in-laws’ that morning. Séverine had made only a short stop at home before leaving again with a girlfriend—her name was Chloé, he seemed to remember—and Léo was going to the home of a certain Gabriel. He was going there on his scooter. Not cool! At least he had promised to sleep there rather than come back in the middle of the night, tired and—who knows?—drunk.
He and Claire were to dine with the Chambruns. Fanny worked with Claire at the Rivesaltes middle school, and Érick was a schoolteacher in a primary school in Espira-de-l’Agly. That was also where they lived.
Gilles was finally ready: it was time to leave.
In the car, he thought again about that moment of absence in front of the door to his armoire. It was not the first time that had happened to him. It felt strange to have his head filled, not with those eternal dark thoughts that seemed to circle round and round, but filled . . . filled with emptiness. Yes, that was exactly how he felt. Filled with emptiness.
In general, it lasted a few seconds. He suddenly froze, no longer moving, no longer thinking, indifferent to everything. The world could have fallen apart and he wouldn’t have flinched.
The first time, he’d attributed this phenomenon to alcohol. A facile excuse but one that had not worked for the second time. He hadn’t drunk. Or rather . . . not enough to explain such absences.
“Why are you turning here?”
Gilles, surprised, gave the wheel a yank that caused him to go over the white line.
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