Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  Julie was completing her explanations. She implied that they’d thought for a moment that the corbeau might be a police officer at the video-surveillance center but were on the wrong track and had come there to confirm that conclusion. Together, they had decided on this tactic before entering the house. It was based on their first question:

  “Why did you lie to us?”

  Martinez had poured himself another glass of wine. He drank at least half of it and answered without raising his eyes to Julie’s:

  “You think it’s easy to tell a pretty girl that you’ve gone off the street because you’re too scared and that you’re divorced because your wife has made you a cuckold?”

  Sebag noticed the wink Julie gave him to make sure that the word hadn’t hurt him. A real mother hen. Martinez swallowed the other half of his glass:

  “My grandfather always said: it’s better to be envied than pitied.”

  Strangely, it was that formula that touched Gilles. Had he been pitied? Claire and Julie had probably pitied him a little, and he certainly pitied himself. But he’d regained control of himself. Everything would go better now.

  “Since you have nothing to reproach yourself for,” Julie went on, “you can let us inspect your house?”

  “Well, go ahead, then . . .”

  Julie got up and disappeared into the house. Martinez’s agreement without arguing already made it possible to cross him off the notorious list that no longer had a single name on it.

  “Do you have a camera?” Gilles asked.

  “Yes, I have one. A gift from my parents. So that I could take pictures of my daughters.”

  He went to get it from a box and showed it to Sebag. It was a very classical compact model.

  “Can I look at it?”

  Martinez turned the camera on and handed it to him. Gilles made the images pass by. He found only photos of two adorable, smiling girls.

  “They’re beautiful,” he said, handing the camera back to Martinez. “Can I also ask you to write me a note on a sheet of paper?”

  Martinez agreed again. As docile as a sheep. Sebag dictated the famous phrase to him, the same one he’d found at Abad’s house on the back of a photo taken by the corbeau: “Every Thursday and sometimes on Tuesday. You know how to reach me.” Then he put the paper in his pocket. He wasn’t an expert in graphology but the writing seemed to him completely different. Julie came back to them.

  “Nothing to report . . . I even had a look in the garage.”

  She sat down again on the couch. The serious stuff could begin now. Sebag cleared his throat.

  “How did you learn that your wife had a lover?”

  The question disconcerted Martinez.

  “But . . . why are you asking that personal question again?”

  “Was it by following her with the city’s cameras that you found out?”

  “Are you still suspecting me of being your corbeau?”

  “No, you’re no longer a suspect. But you might have used the city’s surveillance system to spy on your wife.”

  “You’re crazy, that’s serious, too, as an accusation! You’re trying to get me fired.”

  He tried to pour himself more wine but Julie stopped him.

  “You want me dead, is that it? First the attack, then the divorce, and now dismissal . . . You want me to throw myself out the window?”

  “Don’t snivel: it’s better to be envied than pitied, right?” Sebag snapped. “And besides, this is a one-story house.”

  Martinez made up his mind to answer. He did it hurriedly:

  “I bugged her phone. I found spy software on the Internet, I loaded it on her mobile and that way I could follow her movements. One day, I saw she was spending the afternoon in Canohès, where, so far as I was aware, she didn’t know anybody. I went there and I saw them together in her car. There, now you know everything. Personally, I’ve never used the city’s cameras to follow anyone close to me, I swear it to you.”

  There was one adverb too many in his sentence.

  “You were a jealous husband?” Sebag asked.

  “Not so much . . .”

  “Sooner or later, all men and women have suspicions regarding their spouses, but few of them go so far as to bug their telephones.”

  “All right, let’s say that I was jealous!”

  “You undoubtedly had serious reasons for being jealous,” Julie suggested.

  Martinez’s tone softened.

  “When a woman comes home late more and more often, when she seems absent even when she’s with you, when she pays more attention than usual to how she looks, you begin to wonder. That’s legitimate, isn’t it?”

  Julie glanced again at Sebag, who took a slug of rotgut before continuing.

  “And you bought software to bug her phone?”

  “I don’t know what you would have done in my place, but that’s what I did.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You have to have been in my position to know what you’d be capable of doing in such a situation.”

  Sebag gritted his teeth. Good God! Was he doing it on purpose, this guy, pushing on the places where it hurt? But he mustn’t let himself be distracted, they’d arrived at the crucial point, they had to set the hook.

  Gilles supposed that Martinez hadn’t learned of his wife’s adultery, like all the others, simply by photos. His hypothesis was audacious, and at first Julie had rejected it when he’d talked about it. But he’d been able to convince her. A little by the pertinence of his arguments, and a lot by the urgency to try it out. They hadn’t made much progress in their investigation, and Castello was not going to delay blowing the whistle to end the game. They had to go all out.

  Sebag took a deep breath. Laurent Martinez’s answers and his attitude had strengthened his belief. People don’t bug their spouses’ telephones on a simple suspicion. It was true that he was especially well placed to know that. The “special agent” hadn’t yet told them everything. They had to make him spit it out.

  Now!

  CHAPTER 46

  The wind had turned. He felt it. It wasn’t good.

  Not good at all.

  Annie had returned early this evening. She was smiling, looked happy. They ate dinner watching the evening news on channel 1.

  While they were having dessert, the phone rang. Annie answered it. It was Chloé, one of their daughters. She lived in Toulouse and had a job as a nurse’s aide at the Larrey hospital. Since she had learned that she was pregnant, she called her mother every other night on average. Little Ugo was supposed to be born before spring.

  Left alone at the table, he reflected. For the past two days, the cops had been spending more time with the municipal police. The policemen hadn’t limited themselves to viewing the archives. They were hanging around in the video-surveillance room, talking with someone or other. Something was wrong. Lieutenant Sebag wasn’t there for the images. This morning, he had even had the sense that he was being followed. Maybe not him directly, but Martinez. That didn’t leave him much time before they found their way back to him.

  No, it wasn’t good at all. They weren’t there only for the images.

  Not only.

  Olivier cleared the table. Sitting on the couch, Annie continued her conversation with their daughter. Chloé had just finished decorating the baby’s room. According to what he’d understood, she’d opted for a frieze with little blue bear cubs. Annie found that pretty.

  After putting the dishes and the silverware in the dishwasher, he drew a glass from his box of fruity Catalan wine. He was nervous, he needed to relax. Back in the living room, he went up to the picture window, and slowly pulled back a corner of the curtain.

  It was then that he saw the car.

  Parked about twenty meters from the house, the white unmarked police car sheltered two figures. He shiver
ed. They were there. Already.

  There wasn’t a moment to lose. He had to make everything disappear.

  Still on the phone, Annie was following with astonished eyes his coming and going in the house. He wrapped his laptop and his camera in plastic bags and then disappeared into the garden. He came back to the living room shortly afterward to get rid of a pile of sheets of paper and photos in the blazing fireplace. His wife’s concern kept growing.

  “What’s going on, Olivier?”

  He approached and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I love you.”

  He was waiting to hear the doorbell ring in the little house and he jumped when two knocks came at the door.

  CHAPTER 47

  Sebag and Julie had parked their car at the curb and hadn’t taken their eyes off the house at no. 12. They couldn’t stay very long. In this neighborhood of small homes, everybody knew each other and their vehicle would soon be spotted. Even at this prime-time hour when everybody was glued to their TV screens.

  The house they were watching had a single level. A recess in the façade sheltered a table and two chairs in white plastic. On the left, the living room’s picture window was transmitting bluish flashes onto the little garden, while on the right, the garage door windows cast a yellowish light on the little car parked in the driveway.

  Two lights, two universes, two lives.

  They were on the wrong track: the corbeau hadn’t divorced, and he wasn’t separated, either. He lived with his wife, but in two parallel worlds. Regarding the rest Gilles had in principle been right, but it was too early to celebrate. Julie looked at her phone to see what time it was. 8:35 P.M.

  “More than twenty-five minutes . . . What the hell are they doing?”

  “I’m sure that Castello is doing all he can.”

  Laurent Martinez hadn’t dilly-dallied for long. The tactic perfected by the police officers had proven effective. They’d let the municipal officer make his way to the truth, and once he understood, Martinez had been staggered. Frightened, he had decided to confess everything. He’d coughed up a name, thus confirming Sebag’s hypothesis. Namely, that the corbeau had discovered his vocation by accident and had not been prudent when he made his first denunciation. As they left Martinez’s house, Gilles and Julie had had a brief discussion. They had to act quickly if they wanted to conduct a search before the fateful hour.

  “This guy must have spied on dozens of people over the months,” Gilles had argued. “If we haven’t heard about his dirty work before, that’s because he’s careful and well-informed, and he hasn’t taken any more risks since that first time with Martinez. He saw us at the video-surveillance center and he undoubtedly noticed that we were following his colleague. He may be getting rid of all the evidence against him.”

  “In that case, it might already too late,” Julie replied. “And if we don’t find anything at his house, we’ll have only Martinez’s testimony. That might be enough to get him fired from the municipal police but not to charge him with all the other cases.”

  Gilles took a coin out of his pants pocket and showed it to his colleague:

  “Heads or tails?”

  “Is that the way you work?”

  “Always. Didn’t Jacques tell you? My famous intuition is just a legend.”

  Gilles tossed the coin. It spun in the air and fell on his open palm. Heads. But Gilles felt no relief.

  “Shall we go anyway?”

  “Banco.”

  Gilles had let Julie drive while he called Castello. Confronted with the weakness of the evidence in the case, they’d thought it prudent to go through the superintendent in trying to convince the prosecutor to issue a search warrant. Since then, they’d been waiting in the car in front of Olivier Carbonnell’s house.

  The telephone finally rang. Castello had won, the prosecutor had given them the green light. They got out of the car, ignored the doorbell button next to the mailbox, and walked up the driveway. Julie knocked on the door. A little brunette with a plump figure opened it. Sebag had informed himself; he knew that Annie Carbonnell was fifty-two years old, but she didn’t look it at all. Gilles and Julie showed their badges and were direct:

  “We’d like to see your husband and search your house.”

  The door that led from the entry hall to the garage opened and Olivier Carbonnell, nicknamed 20/15 by his colleagues, appeared in it.

  “What’s this about?”

  “You know very well what it’s about,” Gilles replied.

  Carbonnell said nothing and didn’t pretend to be astonished. On the other hand, his wife’s surprise seemed complete. She said to her husband:

  “What’s going on, Olivier?”

  “Don’t worry, dear, it’s a mistake.”

  The search lasted two hours. It was carried out for the most part in silence. The lieutenants at no point justified what they were doing, and the municipal officer asked no questions, limiting himself to observing them with his dark, sharp eyes as he smoothed with his index finger the delicate black mustache that crowned his upper lip. As for Annie Carbonnell, she huddled in an armchair next to the fireplace to watch the rest of her detective series. Season twelve, episode thirty-six, then episode thirty-seven.

  After the parents’ bedroom and then that of the girls, which they had vacated, Gilles and Julie searched the garage with particular attention. In this space transformed into an office and a spare bedroom, they found a desktop computer but no printed documents, nothing but blank pages of photographic paper.

  “Do you do photography?” Gilles asked.

  “I used to when the girls were little.”

  On a shelf at eye level stood a long series of family photo albums. The years were written on the spines, 1993 for the first one, and the current year on the last. Sebag thought about the photo albums that were lying dormant at his house. Claire had spent a lot of time on them during Léo and Séverine’s first years, but little by little she had slacked off; smiling kids with golden curls always inspire parents more than pimply, grumbling adolescents. He never looked at these albums. The passage of time had always given him the blues. He pointed to the photographic paper carefully piled next to a high-performance printer.

  “Did you move to digital some time ago?”

  “I made the shift very early on. Beginning of the 2000s. It’s so much more practical!”

  “We didn’t find the camera, have you stopped taking pictures?”

  “The girls are grown up, I sold my Nikon. I’m waiting until I’m a grandfather to begin again.”

  Olivier Carbonnell had just uttered two sentences of more than twenty words apiece. Sebag observed him attentively. A suspect was often more talkative when he was lying.

  “But you still have the paper . . .”

  “You can’t sell it. And then, I’m optimistic: I hope to have grandchildren before long. My eldest is already twenty-four, and she has been living with her boyfriend for three years. I suppose they must be thinking seriously about having children.”

  Sebag remained skeptical: the paper hadn’t yellowed, it must not have been sitting there very long. Julie sat down in front of the computer. It was on, all she had to do was wake it up. First she looked at the “images” file; it was strangely empty.

  “Did you clean up before we arrived?”

  Carbonnell replied from the bed, where he had sat down.

  “Not at all, if you seize the computer, your experts will tell you: I haven’t erased anything. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but it’s not in there.”

  Carbonnell’s serenity worried Sebag. Carbonnell must know about computers and he seemed sure of his knowledge. Would Elsa Moulin prove more talented? She’d have to be. For the moment, they had no other hope. There was also the graphological examination but even if the experts were certain, that would never be a sufficient proof.


  Their gamble was in danger of becoming a flop. Too bad, they had to go all the way.

  Sebag contemplated the former garage. It was more than a simple office and spare bedroom. He sensed a life in it. A bit of fabric was sticking out from under the pillow. A T-shirt or pajamas, probably. He left Julie to examine the computer and went out into the little yard behind the house. He lit a cigarette. Surrounded by the grounds of the neighboring houses, the Carbonnells’ rectangle of earth seemed neglected. Short bamboo stakes stuck in the ground in an X pattern preserved the memory of a former vegetable garden. Rows of tomatoes must have grown there, but now there were only tall grasses. At the back of the garden, a compost pile was rotting the sides of a little shed. It took Sebag only five steps to cross the yard. He opened the rickety door of the wooden shed and pushed on a switch. No light. He took out his telephone and had a look at the place in the light of the screen. He moved a few tools, a few bags of potting soil, but found nothing that might have been intended for anything but maintaining a vegetable garden. He had to force himself to close the door again. Before returning to the house, he threw his cigarette butt on the compost pile.

  “Do you admit to having informed your colleague Laurent Martinez that his wife had a lover?”

  “Yes. And that was a serious mistake on my part, I should never have done that.”

  Sheltered by his thick eyebrows, Olivier Carbonnell’s dark eyes remained fixed on Sebag.

  “How did you come to have that . . . information?”

  “By accident. I was working in front of my screens and I recognized Laurent’s wife. I saw her going into a store downtown, a printer’s shop. Then I saw the metal shutter go down, and she didn’t come out again. It was noon, and I took my break. When I came back an hour later, I put the images from the same camera on my screen. The metal shutter was still down, and it stayed down for a little while longer. Then it was raised and Virginie came out.”

  His eyelids half closed, sharpening his look even more: