Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  “It would be smarter to give me your mobile phone,” Sebag advised him. “You’re not going to worry your wife or disturb my colleagues in Bayonne for nothing?”

  “For nothing?”

  “Or for so little . . .”

  Bidol reluctantly obeyed, putting his phone in the compartment between the two seats. Sebag slowed down and used a path that crossed the road to make a U-turn. Once the car was headed in the right direction, he stopped. Then he switched off the ignition and pulled out his gun. He flipped off the safety and then put it on the dashboard, the butt pointing toward Bidol.

  “What would you do in my place?”

  Bidol didn’t lower his eyes.

  “I’m not in your place.”

  His voice trembled a bit. That was all.

  “And I don’t have a gun at my disposal to have fun scaring people.”

  “Do you think I’m having fun?”

  Bidol reflected. Gilles suspected that Bidol knew a lot about his character. He knew very well that Claire and her lover hadn’t always been thinking about him, and that they must not have spent much of their precious time talking about him, but he couldn’t have always been absent from their discussions.

  “I wouldn’t like to be in your place.”

  Bidol let go of the door handle to turn more toward Gilles.

  “I know you’re suffering and that you didn’t come here to have fun. But I also know that you won’t hurt me. You want to scare me, and I assure you that you’ve succeeded.“

  Bidol glanced at the pistol before looking at Sebag again.

  “Because I’m well aware that one clumsy word on my part could change everything in spite of all that.”

  Two mountain-bike riders emerged from a trail and headed in their direction. Bidol started to reach for the door handle but then changed his mind. They waited in silence until the two bikes had passed the car.

  “Whatever you may think at this moment, Claire deserves your love,” Bidol continued. “And she has never loved anyone but you. I wanted to leave my wife. But Claire never considered for a second living with me.”

  One question occurred to Gilles. One of the rare questions that he had been able to avoid asking his wife.

  “Why did you have an argument one night at the Deux Margot Cafe?”

  “Did she tell you about that?”

  “No.”

  “You were spying on us?”

  “No, not that either. I learned about it by chance. Pure chance.”

  One day last summer, during an investigation into the disappearance of some young Dutch girls, he had laid several photos on the bar at the Deux Margot, a Perpignan bistro run by two former prostitutes from Paris. And without having thought about it in advance, he had slipped a photo of Claire among the pictures of the young women. It was the only photo the owners of the bar recognized. They had talked about the presence of a man with her and about an argument.

  “We argued precisely because I had just told her that I wanted to leave Michèle. But for her, our affair was a friendship that had gone too far, and that was all. She got angry and so did I.”

  Bidol looked at the distant, undulating silhouette of the cyclists. They were coming to the intersection with the road.

  “You’re jealous of me and I understand that,” Claire’s lover went on. “But you should know that I was jealous of you, too. And I still am: I would have so much liked her to love me as much as she loves you.”

  Sebag nodded. In the end, he admired this lycée teacher’s guts. He was afraid but he hadn’t let himself be thrown off balance. Gilles also admired his words: they were intended to be flattering, of course, but they seemed sincere. Strangely, even though he didn’t like manly confrontations on athletic fields, in staff rooms, or in the parking lot at headquarters, he understood what two competitors might feel after a fight. Beyond rivalries and even hatreds, there could be respect. Bidol had won a first round by sleeping with Claire. Sebag had won the second round by keeping his wife. The third, decisive round was going to his advantage.

  “You still haven’t answered my question: what would you do in my place?”

  “I did answer: I’m not in your place.”

  “In my place . . .” Gilles insisted, “you would tell the whole truth to . . . Michèle?”

  “I would be tempted, obviously.”

  He reflected for a few moments before adding:

  “The decision is yours, but I don’t think that one injury can be cured by another.”

  More words that hit home . . . That was the same conclusion that Gilles had come to after thinking about it all the way to Bayonne. But he took care not to reassure Bidol:

  “Well, you see, you ended up answering!”

  He jerked his chin toward the dirt road in front of them.

  “You can leave now.”

  Simon Bidol looked at Sebag, then glanced at the pistol still lying on the dashboard. He must have thought, for a fraction of a sentence, of all the gangster films he’d seen in which the torturer frees his prisoner so that he can shoot him in the back. Nonetheless, he decided to open the car door. But before he got out he pointed to his mobile phone in the compartment.

  “Can I take it back?”

  “That would be a little too easy, don’t you think? It’s only two kilometers to Bayonne, twelve at most to your house. You can walk . . . And then I suppose that my wife’s number is registered in it but not necessarily in your memory. So you won’t be tempted again.”

  Bidol accepted the deal.

  “As you wish. We aren’t going to shake hands, I suppose?”

  “You have courage and a sense of humor . . . Don’t push it too far, all the same.”

  “You went to great lengths to scare me. You succeeded.”

  Bidol carefully got out of the car. Sebag had deliberately stopped next to a muddy shoulder. The history-geography teacher went around the front of the car and came back to Sebag.

  “Are you going to tell my wife everything?”

  Gilles took out a cigarette and lit it.

  “I haven’t decided yet. And then . . . you need to be scared a little while longer.”

  “If you decide that she has to know the whole truth, please let me tell her myself . . . It would be better for her. And maybe for you, too.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Driving back on the autoroute, Sebag drank one can of energy drink after another. His eyes were closing all by themselves, he had to keep awake. After he passed Toulouse, he pulled into a rest stop. First he filled the tank and then parked in an out-of-the-way area. He sat down at a picnic table covered with crumbs and eggshells. He smoked another cigarette.

  With Bidol, he’d been trying to keep from being overwhelmed by anger, and now he was waiting for it, hoping for it, wanting it . . .

  He still had a score to settle.

  He closed his eyes.

  He was six years old. So that he didn’t have to go to the children’s activity center, Gérard took care of him on Wednesdays. A sales rep dealing in vacuum cleaners, sewing machines, and other household appliances, he took Gilles along with him when he went door-to-door. Some of his customers seemed easier to convince than others. An hour, sometimes two. He was set in front of the television in a living room and waited very patiently. In general, the wait was rewarded. Gérard came out with a smile, and happy to have made a sale, he hurried to find a store where he could buy his son candy. Caramel bars, licorice, chewing gum in a tube or a roll . . . Everything he was usually denied was put within the reach of his desires.

  On the condition that nothing was said to Mama. It was their secret, just the two of them.

  One day, when he was waiting in a pretty blonde’s living room, the television had gone on the blink. Black screen. Gilles was worried, but he waited. A long time. Then he got
up and went to look for his father in the long hallways of the apartment. Sounds had guided him. Alarming little cries, groans. Not at all like the soft humming of a vacuum cleaner or a sewing machine. He’d opened the door and seen them. His father, the woman on top of him, both of them naked and sweating. Fear had frozen him on the spot.

  He could no longer recall the following minutes. But he remembered very well that that afternoon there was no visit to a store. Gérard had taken him to a toy shop and Gilles had come out with the cowboy outfit he’d long dreamed of having. With the same promise as ever, but expressed with more intensity than usual. Above all, say nothing to Mama.

  However, for a six-year-old child some secrets are too hard to keep. Especially when Mama was astonished, worried, and began to ask questions. Harassed, Gilles had ended up confessing. He’d talked about that Wednesday and all the others.

  The following Wednesday, he was sent back to the children’s activity center. No more television but games instead, no more pretty women but activity leaders who were generally rather kind. In that respect, he wasn’t any worse off.

  But at home nothing was ever the same again. Gérard was there less and less, and Mama seemed to have lost her cheerfulness. In the evening, she sang only sad songs that she wasn’t always able to finish. It had taken Gilles years to put a name to this malady that had struck his mother. Depression. She never really recovered from it.

  Gilles crushed out his cigarette between two eggshells on the picnic table. He took out his mobile and keyed in a number. The children had told him that it was still good. Léo and Séverine saw their grandfather once or twice a year and called him from time to time.

  One ring, two . . . On the fifth ring, someone picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Gérard?”

  “Yes. Who is it?”

  An old, slightly trembly voice.

  “Gilles.”

  A long silence.

  “Hello, son.”

  A voice that was on the defensive, surprised, a voice that didn’t want to yield to hope.

  “How are you, lad?”

  “Not so good.”

  “I’m not so good, either, you know.”

  Gérard had misunderstood the meaning of his call. Gilles closed his eyes, drew strength from his anger. He had to strike.

  “I needed to talk to you.”

  The breathing on the other end of the line grew tense. Gérard didn’t dare believe it.

  “You’re a real bastard, Papa.”

  The slap. A long silence. No more breathing.

  “I have known for a long time what you think of me.”

  “I never told you.”

  “You made me feel it countless times when we were still seeing each other.”

  “But I needed you to hear it directly.”

  “You’ve done that. I hope you’ll feel better now.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  “Thanks, son.”

  Gilles was caught up short.

  “Thanks for having called me ‘Papa.’ It’s been such a long time . . .”

  In the late afternoon he finally got to the Salses hill. From this slight elevation, the whole grandeur of the Catalan panorama was revealed. Framed by the chain of summits dominated by the white mass of Le Canigou, the green plain of Roussillon extended as far as the Mediterranean. Having lived for years with the mists and overcast skies of Chartres and La Beauce, Sebag never ceased to marvel at Northern Catalonia’s luminosity, even in winter.

  A sudden gust of wind blew his car a little sideways. He gripped the wheel more tightly. The wind socks alongside the autoroute were all horizontal. The tramontane was clearing the sky of clouds and, by cleansing the air of impurities, bringing out the clear lines of the horizon. It was the price they paid for the Catalan climate, and it never failed to present the bill.

  Gilles was soon home, if not happy—not yet—at least relieved. This escapade had done him good. It would help him to turn over a new leaf, he was sure of that.

  Soon.

  The next step had to be solving this informer case. They had been treading water for too long. By SMS, Jacques Molina had let him know that Ménard had decided to let Dominique Barrache go. Oddly, it was his wife who had come to get him at headquarters. The mystery of the world and feelings: through their mistake, the policemen seemed to have given new life to a moribund couple.

  In the end, the worst was never certain in this vale of tears. It might turn out that reality was stranger than fiction.

  Oh, well, that was over. Let’s not get distracted! Sebag said to himself. Let’s get back to our main subject, or rather to our corbeau!

  This investigation had gone on far too long. He gave himself twenty-four hours to take a significant step forward. If he failed, he would personally propose to Castello—after talking with Ménard—giving up the investigation. The corbeau’s actions had led to two tragedies, but he was not directly responsible for them. There were other priorities.

  As he neared Perpignan on the autoroute, he mentally reviewed the situation. In particular, he recalled in detail their conversations with Barrache. Ménard had been right to let him go. A false lead had just been set aside.

  So! Now everything had to be done over from the beginning.

  On the one hand, they had in Stéphane Abad a murderer who had been sent photos showing his wife’s infidelity. On the other hand, they had Didier Valls, who had committed suicide after receiving an anonymous letter informing him of his misfortune. The examination of the mobile phones by geolocating the calls made—but only by that means—made it possible to assume that the informer who called Valls might also be the unidentified caller who had contacted Abad several days before the day of the murder. Well-founded assumptions, but no conclusive proof.

  Thus there were two solutions: either they considered these assumptions insufficient and immediately halted a pointless investigation, or they deemed them sufficiently solid and continued to think about them . . .

  So let’s continue to think about them . . .

  That led to Cantalou, the common point of contact among Abad, Balls, and Barrache, their former suspect. Cantalou was the first common point, but not the only one. There was also the billiard hall . . .

  How had he not managed to see that earlier? Abad and Valls played for money. They lost to Barrache, but maybe they often won playing against other adversaries.

  Sebag lit a cigarette. He had hardly any reason to be happy about having taken so long to arrive at the conclusion that had been staring them in the face for several days, but all the same, he was happy and thought he really deserved this reward.

  He smoked with his mind empty and missed the North Perpignan exit. He drove an extra dozen kilometers and left the autoroute on the south side of Perpignan.

  Something was wrong in him.

  He pulled into a rest stop after the exit, got out of the car, and walked up and down smoking another cigarette.

  His mind remained uneasy. The new lead that he’d found didn’t bring him any peace. It was as if he’d taken cough syrup to cure a headache.

  What if the truth lay elsewhere?

  He stubbed out the cigarette he’d just lit. It was unsettling him more than it was helping him. He sat down in a place hidden by cars, with his legs crossed and his buttocks on the edge of the sidewalk.

  He closed his eyes and breathed calmly. A word kept running through his head.

  Epidemic . . .

  “An epidemic of divorces,” those were the words of the specialized lawyer Marina had quoted the preceding night.

  The last time he’d heard the term “epidemic” discussed very seriously had been on a television program: specialists were talking about a veritable epidemic of cancers in the world.

  Could infidelity be the tumor afflicting couples these
days? The parallel seemed to him pertinent. Cancer was spreading over the planet along with the Western way of life: a change in habits and traditions, stress, sedentariness and urban life, the environment, and the increasing longevity of people and couples.

  Yes, the comparison was tempting, but so far as his case was concerned, it led nowhere.

  Epidemic . . .

  He took out his mobile, connected to the Internet, and quickly found the definition he was looking for.

  “Epidemic: rapid increase in the incidence of a disease in a given place at a given time.” The lawyer, one of Marina’s patients, thus found herself overwhelmed by a “rapid increase” in the number of divorces. Could it be imagined that such an epidemic had been raging in Perpignan for several weeks, or even several months?

  He realized that this idea might seem ridiculous and yet he kept turning it over and over, and clung to it: there must be an angle from which it would become pertinent.

  Epidemic . . .

  The definition said that an epidemic was caused by an exogenous factor, a virus or a bacterium involuntarily introduced by a third party. Involuntarily?

  Not always . . .

  So far as Abad and Valls were concerned, there was in fact a third party and he had acted voluntarily.

  Two new images telescoped in his feverish mind. The sponge was giving up its juice. He wasn’t controlling anything. His brain had its own life, it captured images, sounds, and sensations that it carefully preserved in order to reproduce them later. Haphazardly, most of the time, but sometimes with a frightening relevance.

  He closed his eyes.

  Molina’s cheerful smile disturbed his reflection. If his partner saw him, he would get down on his knees and pray to Saint Rita for him out loud.

  Sebag breathed more calmly. He mustn’t let himself lose his concentration. He went back to the images that had invaded him. First of all, Gali’s living room. The smell of gasoline floating in the air. No, that wasn’t what was important. He shivered. Because the wind was blowing around him that evening, or because he’d been wearing a tank top on that day in the living room? It wasn’t clear . . . It wasn’t a shiver from the cold, but from fear. Bastien Gali’s house was only waiting for a spark to explode and a flame was dancing in the fireplace. A strange, colorful flame.