What if Marie’s cat had been alive at the time of the burglary? The food and water bowls weren’t there anymore, but the killer could always have taken them. What if he had decided to spare the cat? To adopt it?
What sort of murderer would do a thing like that?
Sitting down to enjoy a helping of smoked herring and potatoes in oil, Merlot poured himself a large glass of Côtes-du-Rhône, then thumped the cork back in with a veteran hand. As he lifted it to his lips, a flash of inspiration brought the glass to a standstill.
“Is that Rosière not unattached?”
A lusty smile crept across his face, and a hand came up to his bald pate to slick back a curl of hair that had long since disappeared. Old habits die hard. The capitaine’s head bobbed up and down.
“Ho ho. And Capestan, too,” he said to himself, full of confidence.
26
Rosière and Lebreton walked around the fishing port to reach the pier, where two lighthouses, one green and one red, faced each other on opposite sides of the channel. The green one was slightly tilted, like a palm tree assailed by one storm too many. The view encompassed the vast bay of Sables-d’Olonne. Little waves were rolling in from the ocean, which was still calm at this early hour. Up on the long promenade hugging the beach, a waiter in an apron and sneakers was laying the tables on the terrace of Brasserie Le Pierrot.
They sat down and ordered a coffee, along with a bowl of water for the dog. Once their order had arrived and the waiter had gone back indoors, Rosière took a deep breath and summarized the facts before they went into battle.
“Objectively speaking, it’s simple enough: if Jallateau doesn’t talk, we’ve got nada, diddly-squat. He’s our number one suspect; in fact he’s our only suspect. If he doesn’t give us the hint of a confession or a fresh lead, then we’re back to square one. And we’ll have to tell the widow that in three months the case will lapse and that it’s time to move on.”
“The last time the police questioned this guy they came back empty handed,” Lebreton said.
“The last time the police questioned this guy they did a shitty job of it. Up to us to prove we’re better.”
Rosière unwrapped the biscuit that came with her coffee and gave it to her dog, who took it delicately between his teeth, gobbled it up in one gulp, then looked at her eagerly, all set for round two. Rosière looked at Lebreton, who surrendered his speculoos.
“You look like you’ve got a plan,” he said.
“No. But we’re not going in stark naked—I’ve got something up my sleeve. We’ll win him over with a fake commission.”
“I’m not convinced that’s admissible, Eva—”
“Oh my little Loulou, you are sweet. Listen—we have to make do with what we’ve got. He’s loaded and lawyered up, and we don’t have any cargo whatsoever. We need to come in at an angle. This Guénan business goes way back—he won’t suspect a thing. Let’s go in softly-softly, talc up his balls, then grab them.”
Lebreton stirred his coffee in silence for a few moments. If they went in like their predecessors, they would come away with the same results. Rosière was right about that. Better to mix things up.
“Fine,” he said, setting his spoon down on the saucer. “I will be amazed if it works, but I’m listening.”
At 9:15 a.m., they left the Lexus at the Marée parking lot next to a thirty-eight-ton ship unloading huge polystyrene boxes full of sardines and walked to Jallateau’s company headquarters. Between the seaweed and the bird shit, they were getting a good dose of the local fragrance, Rosière thought. There were few people around, and the capitaine was the only woman. The men gazed at them: they were hardly your average tourists looking to get off the beaten track. Gigantic concrete towers loomed overhead, dominating the rusty corrugated-iron roofs of the warehouses. The grinding of the cranes competed with the squawking of the seagulls, and farther along the masts of a thousand yachts swayed clumsily in the wind. The sea smelled of oil here. They arrived at the glass doors of a long, single-story building, above which were the words JALLATEAU SHIPBUILDERS in blue lettering.
“Let’s smoke him out,” Rosière said. “Best celebrity smile, now.”
At the reception, a young man with ash-blond hair asked them if they had an appointment.
“Yes, at 9:30,” the capitaine said. She had been careful to make an appointment. “Madame Rosière and Monsieur Lebreton.”
“Absolutely. For a forty-two-foot catamaran.”
“Indeed.”
They did not have long to wait before Jallateau arrived. He greeted them and introduced himself in a friendly manner. He was wearing a gray suit and pointy shoes. The guy looked like a desert buggy ready to tackle a dune: thick, bumper-like eyebrows protecting his steely glare. Rosière realized it might not be so easy to hoodwink him after all.
They went into his office, their shoes sinking into the thick carpet, which was pristine and beige. There were shelves running the length of the wall exhibiting model boats and a few framed newspaper articles. At Jallateau’s back, a wide sliding window looked out over the mouth of the channel. On the far bank you could make out the waterfront with its endless row of low multicolored houses. For Rosière, the charming view made focusing on Jallateau’s ugly face all the more painful.
She kicked off her con artistry while Lebreton kept an eye on the shipbuilder’s reactions. Jallateau was tight lipped as Rosière relayed her spiel, and when she finished he looked at them both in silence. He brushed a few pencil shavings off his desk, then clasped his hands together.
“You don’t want a boat.”
“How dare—”
“Buying a boat is the stuff of dreams, and you’re not dreaming,” he said with a contemptuous smile. “So. What do you want from me?”
Rosière needed a plan B. Supplier? Mafia? Insurer? She racked her brains as quickly as she could, but Lebreton beat her to it:
“Commandant Lebreton and Capitaine Rosière. We’re investigating the murder of Yann Guénan.”
Jallateau shut down immediately. An icy chill swept through the room. The silence lasted an age, pulsing with an electric tension.
“Police,” he said.
The businessman’s body language had lost all semblance of customer-facing courtesy, and his shoulders squared up as he sat forward in his chair.
“I wasted enough time with you back then,” he spat with the tone of a dockworker. “Get lost!”
Lebreton braced himself as he opened up his file.
“First we’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I’ve heard them all before: I didn’t like them then, and I won’t like them now,” Jallateau said.
“Guénan came here with a dossier about the Key Line shortly before his death. Did you have anything to hide?”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing!” Jallateau exploded. “It’s a fantasy dreamed up by the filth! Nothing but mass paranoia. Don’t start running after me with your conspiracy theories again. Do you really believe that this shipwreck hasn’t been examined with a fine-tooth comb? Have you read the results of the public inquiry into the ship? There are six fucking volumes, a foot thick! Experts, engineers, insurers, judges, inspectors . . . my offices were full of them for months! Americans, French, even Cubans! Ten years of official investigation and they’ve got nothing on me! And do you know why? Because I’ve got nothing to do with that fucking accident! They should never have set sail in that weather, end of story. Now get out!”
The two police officers stayed where they were. Jallateau’s face had turned purple and his hand was shaking as he pointed at the door.
“I said fuck off!”
“What do you think?” Lebreton said, turning to Rosière. “Should we fuck off? Does that sound good to you?”
“No, not so much. I like it here—we’ve got a nice view across the harbor.”
Outside, a Zodiac was coming up the channel, its sausage-like sides bouncing off the choppy water. Lebreton looked back at Jallateau:
For a moment, Rosière wondered if the sailor was planning on throwing a punch. His torso swelled, but he thought the better of it. Lebreton’s powerful physique had that effect—it had been one of the secrets to his success as a negotiator. Wearing a foul expression, Jallateau chose to glare at Rosière instead.
“The experts weren’t on board the ship,” she said, relishing the situation. “Guénan was. Did he blackmail you?”
“I’ve got nothing else to say. If you want to stay, fine, but I have some reading to do.”
Jallateau gathered a pile of documents, picked up a pen, and started crossing out a few lines from the first page. After a short while, Rosière opened the outer pocket of her handbag and took out her cell phone, then made a show of browsing through her contact list.
“Loïc Cleac’h—does that name mean anything to you? I know I have his number here somewhere . . .”
Jallateau knew the Breton businessman extremely well. As Rosière could have read in any number of publications, the millionaire had just ordered the biggest luxury catamaran ever built in his shipyard. She brought the cell phone to her ear.
“He’ll be relieved to hear that—according to the experts—your boats don’t sink. It’s ringing,” she said, pointing at the earpiece.
The shipbuilder dropped his pen on his paperwork and rubbed his eyes before interrupting:
“Okay, okay.”
He was tired of this business. Lowering his tone slightly, he continued:
“Listen, no disrespect to the memory of Guénan, but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. I don’t know much about his dossier, but apart from the petition, it can’t have amounted to much. Even then, what’s a petition worth at the end of the day? It wasn’t just me he had a problem with, you know. He was looking for a passenger, too.”
A passenger. Handy that, thought Rosière, refusing to be taken for a turkey.
Lebreton and Rosière left the interview a few minutes later feeling fairly despondent. There was no doubt the public inquiry had punctured Jallateau’s potential motive: the shipbuilder was hardly likely to take out a man who was threatening to sue him when officials from several different states were lining up to scupper his company. The widow’s unfailing support for her heroic husband had clouded their logical interpretation of the events. But there was still reason to suspect Jallateau, Rosière was sure of it. The close interval between Guénan’s visit and his murder rendered the shipbuilder’s innocence highly unlikely. All they had otherwise was this mystery passenger, about whom Jallateau had been unable to provide any details whatsoever.
At the end of their long day, the officers settled in to their hotel, where they had adjoining rooms linked by a small balcony. Earlier they had updated the commissariat before deciding to stay on for the evening to enjoy some ocean air and make the journey feel more worthwhile. As they ambled along the beach, the dense sand had resisted their weight. They didn’t speak much, preferring to savor the rhythm of the waves and the backwash. The dog, on the other hand, zigzagged around for miles on end, honoring each ruined sandcastle with a delighted jet of urine, barking at the seagulls as they flew languidly away, and digging hole after hole before rubbing his sandy face against their trousers. Then they had retired to their hotel and its seafood restaurant. The ocean had gone back to sleep, all stillness and silence.
In the middle of the night, Lebreton woke with a start. I don’t know much about his dossier: Jallateau’s words had waited for this moment of calm to return to the surface. If Guénan and the shipbuilder had barely broached the dossier, then what had they spoken about?
Perhaps the mystery passenger that they had assumed was just a red herring did exist after all.
The commandant drew his sheet aside and crossed the room to get his overnight bag, a retro leather affair with fashionably shabby straps. He took out the dossier that Maëlle had given them and started rereading the pages for the third time, skimming through for the list of signatories to Guénan’s petition. The sailor’s delicate, tight handwriting was virtually illegible, but in the middle of the dozens of names, one caught his attention.
It was so unthinkable that he had to pull the sheet of paper closer to check he had read it correctly. No doubt about it. Lebreton put down the list and paused to think about what this discovery might imply.
Extraordinary.
Rosière was going to be over the moon. Lebreton was about to go and knock on her door, but the digital clock on his bedside table showed it was 4:00 a.m. It would have to wait until breakfast.
He went out to the balcony and sat down in the white plastic chair that was covered with a slick layer of sea spray. He lit a cigarette in the cool night air and looked out across the moonlit sea. He would try to sleep a little more before dawn.
Rosière was enjoying a cup of tea and some tartines on the terrace at Café des Sauniers, a small blue building where someone had gone to the effort of creating a mural showing a flock of seagulls. Pilou was licking his bowl thoroughly clean, pushing it right up against the table leg. The capitaine, never underprepared, kept a bag of dog biscuits and a bowl in the trunk of her car. She waved at Lebreton as he came out of the hotel. Pilou ran over to meet him, and the commandant tickled him behind the ears before heading to Rosière with his gentle stride. He had slicked back his thick hair after his shower without drying it. He grabbed the back of his chair with one hand, while the other scratched his five o’clock shadow.
“Did you shave with a stale baguette?”
Lebreton ordered a coffee and a croissant then sat down.
“I brought my razor, but I forgot the blades. Mea culpa.”
For months Lebreton had not forgotten a thing, purely because he had all the time in the world to get himself organized. Perhaps the joy of leaving had upset the pattern.
“Tea forgivea,” the capitaine answered, lifting her elbow impatiently to brush off some stray crumbs, but the jam was making them stick.
“Right, off we go, I suppose,” she continued. “Jallateau won’t take too kindly to being bothered again. It’s weird that no one has managed to find a scrap of evidence against him.”
“Maybe because it’s not all so simple,” Lebreton answered, sliding a document across the table.
With his index finger, he drew Rosière’s attention to one line in particular. She picked up her cup and leaned over the sheet of paper. She frowned as her memory whirred into action.
“That name does ring a bell . . .”
Suddenly it registered, and she stared at Lebreton incredulously. The commandant tore his croissant in half and nodded, smiling in triumph.
The springs creaked as Gabriel leapt onto his bed. He had just gotten back from the births, marriages, and deaths registrar at the town hall, where he’d battled for hours to obtain duplicates. He was one of those kids who was forever checking the wrong box on official forms. It turned out that marrying the girl you love was an arduous process in this country.
The old cat sloped in and did a tour of the room, sniffing all the furniture as it went. Then he jumped onto his master’s bed, got comfortable on the pillow, and fell asleep with a purr. Gabriel stroked him for a moment, then took a list out of the side pocket of his Bermuda shorts. Instinctively he flattened the crumpled piece of paper against his thigh. All the names had been crossed out, with one exception. He unlocked his cell phone. He had spoken to all the survivors without learning a thing: no one remembered any details about his mother or his father. The only person left was Yann Guénan, the onboard quartermaster. The last telephone call. After this, he would stop.
27
Capestan had summoned all her troops to a morning meeting. Or, more precisely, she had taken advantage of the unlikely presence of a decent number of officers to engage the squad in an overdue powwow.
Lebreton and Rosière were still on the road, but they wouldn’t be long. They had promised some mind-blowing
news. Capestan had reserved two prime seats for them on the old plaid sofa, Orsini’s contribution to the communal refurbishment effort. The capitaine had specified that it was in fact a sofa bed, which had immediately prompted Capestan to ban anyone from unfolding it. The furniture was beginning to mount up, but the living room was big enough to handle it. They had somewhat reshuffled the desks, and the sofa—a comfortable three-seater—was now positioned in front of the fireplace.
The wallpaper process had commenced. Two days before, Évrard and Orsini had primed the walls, with Merlot—glass in hand—issuing advice throughout. Capestan and Torrez had then fitted the wallpaper in half the living room. A paint-covered drop cloth was folded up in a corner of the room by the door next to a bucket of water, a brush, a jar of paste, and three leftover rolls of wallpaper. On the telephone, Lebreton had said he would finish the job this evening after the meeting.
Everyone was in their seat, thinking caps at the ready. Merlot had his back to the window, and next to him Évrard was humming as she fidgeted with her euro coin. She was forever mumbling bits of songs, the odd note that would break off as she picked up a pen and then resume just as quickly. She would keep the rhythm by bobbing her head or tapping her foot. Only the prospect of some sort of wager would get her to sit still. Orsini was sitting, too, ankles and hands crossed, on an orange plastic chair. The door leading to the corridor was open, and through it you could catch a glimpse of Torrez perched on a stool, following the discussion from a deliberate distance.
Two officers were making their first proper appearance. A good five weeks after the official start date and with only a few fleeting visits to check out the décor, they were finally reporting for duty. Finding that the atmosphere wasn’t so bad after all, they had stayed put to do some work.
The first was Dax, a young boxer who had shed as many brain cells in the ring as he had drops of sweat. With his flattened nose and cheerful smile, he had the same enthusiasm for life as a sea lion splashing around in the waves. Before the uppercuts caught up with his coconut, Dax had been one of the sharpest lieutenants in cybercrim. Apparently he was still capable of the odd flash of inspiration, but the team had yet to see any direct evidence of this.
The Awkward Squad Page 13