The man lying there must have been about sixty, with a thin frame and nothing particularly remarkable about him. His black trousers were well cut, expensive no doubt, as were his cashmere jumper and parka. Under his jumper he appeared to be wearing a pyjama top. Evidently he had been in a hurry when he chose his outfit.
His flushed face had gone blue, his left ear was bleeding and his eyes were flecked with red spots. His mouth, wide open in a desperate bid for air, had been stuffed to the brim with Quality Street. In their macabre makeshift bowl, the shiny pink, green, blue and orange wrappers burst forth in an explosion of colour that was incongruous in its jolliness.
As ever, the brutal, irreversible spectacle of death demanded a moment of silence. After a long minute, Torrez squirmed slightly in his sheepskin jacket:
“They’re awful, those pink ones – they’ve got a sort of sugary, white cream inside . . . I prefer the coconut ones, but I can never remember which colour they are.”
“Blue. The blue ones are coconut,” Capestan said as she observed this strange feature of the crime scene.
It looked as if the man had been literally choked to death on sweeties. If they were dealing with the same murderer as Rufus and Melonne, he had done away with the pistol and the silencer. Maybe he had a special hatred of this victim and wanted to kill him with his bare hands? Or did this humiliating display give him particular pleasure?
This man had not been beaten. No need to get him to talk. Either he did not know anything, or he had spilled the beans without offering any resistance.
Commissaire Pharamond came towards them, causing Torrez to move instinctively to the alley to the side. Capestan waited for him.
“They’re about to take the body away if you’re done. We’re still checking out the apartment, doing photos, talking to neighbours and all the usual stuff. But if you want, tomorrow I can give you the keys and grant you access to the sealed evidence. You can form your own opinion.”
“Ah, thank you, that would be handy. As for talking to neighbours, you’re bound to bump into some of my officers – they have some photographs to show around.”
Pharamond paused to think for a moment.
“Remind me which squad you’re part of again?”
“A branch of number 36,” Capestan said, shamelessly skirting round the issue.
“Number 36. The famous number 36. If you had to spell it out, it would definitely be in capitals, wouldn’t it? Number Thirty-Six!”
Capestan prepared herself for the usual sniping comment about Parisians. Perhaps she had not been profuse enough in her thanks. With the B.R.I. and Crim. stonewalling her at every turn, she had greeted her colleague’s complete cooperation with a naturalness that, looking back, had bordered on a sense of superiority. A wave of guilt swept over her and she changed tack immediately.
“Yes, it takes a lot of people to keep the myth alive,” she said with a smile. “My guess is that no-one has explained why we’re here?”
“Not really, no. It sounded like it had something to do with another case, but there was ‘nothing conclusive enough to merit burdening us with information that was almost certainly irrelevant’. They wouldn’t want to distract us from our petty little concerns, now would they.”
“Indeed not.”
Capestan had to choose between continuing in this manner, just with a frank apology, or breaking away from the party line and offering to return the trust that the commissaire had thus far given them. The second option struck her as both the most decent and the most sensible: if she shared the names of the other victims, the officers in Lyon would be able to link their cases as quick as a flash if she was right in thinking that this bloodbath stemmed from some old local grievance.
An impassive Pharamond waited as she thought it through, clearly not holding out hope. He did not try to force her hand or wrangle in any way. Capestan opened her bag and brought out an envelope that contained the notes for the Rufus and Melonne cases, along with the photographs they wanted to distribute around the neighbourhood. She handed it to the commissaire, who accepted it with a pleasantly surprised raise of the eyebrow.
“Unofficially and very much on the sly, if possible, here’s a summary of the two cases that are in a similar vein to the death notice in Le Progrès. Serge Rufus, a retired commissaire, in Paris, and a furniture manufacturer who went by the name of Jacques Maire, born Jacques Melonne, in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.”
“Were their deaths announced in the newspaper as well?”
“No. On a street sign and a war memorial respectively. The killer is sadistic, he enjoys frightening his victims, and painstakingly plans the murders in advance. But he’s no maniac. He’s not on a rampage that he won’t deviate from; he’s having fun, more than anything else. Our preferred theory is that he has a desire for vengeance that has been left to fester too long. He beat Rufus badly, but not Melonne, and it would appear this guy not at all.”
“They talked quicker than the policeman.”
“Yes, that was our thinking,” Capestan said. “But maybe our sense of professional pride is blinding us . . .”
“Maybe. Thank you for this information, commissaire. We’ll waste less time, I reckon. Can I assume that if these names turn up in any files, you wouldn’t be averse to seeing them?”
“I would never dare ask, but since you put it so politely . . .”
The commissaire nodded. He held out his hand again for Capestan to shake, then the forensics team reassumed control of the scene and the curious victim. Torrez emerged from his alley and the two officers left the square on the side that led onto the Saône embankment.
Quai de Bondy. Another swoosh of nostalgia pinned Capestan to the spot. Buildings with colourful façades stretched the length of the riverside. Every hue of Florentine ochre lit up the Lyonnais architecture. To the left climbed the Croix-Rousse hill, its base girdled by the mighty river; while to the right, on the opposite bank, the Fourvière hill rose in the Renaissance quarter, culminating in the basilica that touched the heavens, the city’s highest point.
Capestan had spent her happiest years as a twenty-something on this charming, wonky stretch. She trained at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Police in Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or, living in one of the old town’s classic buildings: thick walls, crooked doors, no lift, flights of stairs worn by six centuries’ worth of inhabitants, huge wooden-slatted blinds that left you with a simple either-or decision (up or down), and a view of the Saône that made it impossible to leave the window.
Anne Capestan could spend hours at a time there, day and night, never quite getting over the beauty of it. Especially on December 8, when the window sills of the city glinted with the dancing flames of a thousand tealights. A night when families went out to visit their own town, the children – overexcited at the late bedtime – always running two or three metres ahead, testing to see how far they were allowed, and cutting through people waiting in line at the food vans for a piping-hot merguez. And all the while, every building bathed in the glow of centuries past. Well before they grew into a major tourist attraction, the lights were the most striking signal that winter was underway.
It was during one of those countless nights with her face pressed against the window that she had had a revelation. Down on the pavement below, she had seen Paul armed with a pot of paint, and she knew that for the rest of her life, it would only be him.
18
Lyon, March 1992
Sitting in a soft, misshapen IKEA sofa, Paul gazed at the neck of his beer bottle wondering what had driven him to act in such a way. In the director’s chair opposite him, Denis, one of his fellow Donkeys, was agreeing that yes, he had indeed behaved like a donkey, a proper one at that, and that no amount of moping around would change the fact that he had got exactly what he deserved.
Paul was a show-off, pure and simple. Although perhaps without the pure. And he was an idiot. Even though he never took himself seriously, he loved the adrenaline that came with performing, the
sense of glory and power that went to his head and sent his limbs into overdrive, making him feel like the lord of all he surveyed. He had always been the head of the gang, matey but macho, the pack-leader at whose feet people fell. Although they were still local, their on-stage success was already red hot, and the siren call of Paris was the absolute focus of Paul’s burning ambition. Whether in Factory’s or Marquise, he was one of those nightlife kings who would enter a club like a conquering hero, oozing supremacy as he fired out nods, grins and finger-guns like alms to the dazzled masses. He was handsome and smiley, content with basking in the glow of his condescension.
He had never been a Don Juan. Notches in the bedpost were not his style. His fickle heart was more disposed to passionate, exclusive, albeit short-lived, love affairs. But this girl was different.
He was madly in love, with eyes for her and her alone. Her presence eclipsed anyone else near her, reducing them to mere interlopers. But Paul had this need, no doubt galvanised by his success, to push his ego ever further forward, to puff his chest to the point of bursting, to play the “you don’t know how lucky you are” card, trying to make her realise how many girls would dream of being in her shoes, or that somehow he was doing her a favour, and that she should be grateful.
Now he was afraid he had blown it. What a moron. Worse still, she seemed resigned to his aloofness. God, he was besotted by her, yet he had wounded her with his self-importance. She had flashed him a half-smile and nodded slightly, then gone home to sleep, letting him return to his club and his vanity.
And he had carried on, like the 23-year-old oaf he was. He was already pretty pissed, arms in the air, a conqueror’s smile, surrounded by his pals. “Hey, guys, I’m nailing a future commissaire!” he said in triumph. “A commissaire! And she’s pretty hot, too! Right? She’s a fucking bomb!” He was happy, chuffed with himself. None of this would have done his street cred. any harm at all, especially with the lads. He gave some high-fives, clinked some glasses, and from that moment on he wasn’t nailing anyone. His voice had carried as far as Anne. With a girl like her, whose pride was explosive to say the least, offending her meant playing with fire.
For three days he called her to say he was sorry, trying every tone, using every trick in the actor’s book, despite meaning all the words he said. “Yes, yes, I understand,” she would reply before hanging up. He had run out of solutions, reduced to staring at his beer bottle in despair, his stomach in knots from missing her so much, in the company of a friend who was running out of patience. He had ruined the best thing that had ever happened to him, all on his own. He had taken aim at his foot and emptied the clip. He had destroyed his life, the real part, the bit that is meant to last for ever.
“Right, Bébert, you can’t wallow here like this.”
His two fellow Donkeys called him Bébert. A nod to Robert Redford. Their way of acknowledging the resemblance without massaging his ego. Clearly it had been effective enough.
“Hey? I said you can’t wallow here like this. Drop it or try to do the impossible, don’t just sit there not eating, refusing to leave the house, letting your beers go warm for hours on end. What do you want to do? I mean, what do you really want to do?”
Paul tore his eyes away from the bottle and started thinking, listening. What was his instinct telling him to do? Was he still in with any sort of chance? How far was he willing to go to win back Anne? Nothing remotely clever came to him. Nothing spectacular or inventive. He just wanted to grab the big pot of paint that was sitting in his corridor and daub “I LOVE YOU” in giant letters on the pavement beneath her apartment. That was what he wanted to do. He was still a teenager at heart.
“In another life, I’d have gone and painted something under her window. But I’m too old for that now.”
Denis hauled himself out of the director’s chair, kicked the bottom of his jeans down towards his biker boots, stubbed out his cigarette in the full ashtray on the table and said:
“Perfect – that’s what you’re going to do. Come with me.”
And without even looking back at Paul, he slid on his Schott bomber jacket, checked he had his car keys, and grasped the pot by its steel handle. Paul jumped to his feet and picked up a paintbrush. Action time.
*
The Volkswagen pulled up on the quai de Bondy beneath Anne’s building.
“Double-park,” Paul said. “I won’t need long.”
His wits a little dulled by the flat Carlsberg and his heart pounding at a hundred thousand beats per minute, he got out of the car with the three-litre pot of white acrylic paint swinging from his hand. It was desperate, ridiculous, but it was his last throw of the dice.
“You keep watch, hey, Denis? If I get seen by the police my father will tear me a new one.”
Denis nodded, got out of the car too, then stood close by, scanning the surrounding area with a vigilant eye. At 4.00 a.m., even this part of town was quiet. Paul spent a few minutes fighting with his keys to get the lid off. It had not occurred to him to bring a screwdriver. Eventually he managed to lever it off, plunge the brush into the pot and remove it covered in a ring of bright white paint.
He glanced at the building. Her apartment was on the third floor. All the lights were off, which was hardly surprising given the time. Anne was asleep. He turned his back to her dark window, feeling stupid, but charged and feverish too. Maybe she would be moved by this. He felt so guilty – why not cancel out one childish act with another? An eye for an eye and all that. His stomach was churning, telling him to do it.
He started writing in capitals on the pavement. The concrete was dirty and dusty, and the acrylic was not sticking; the brush just came back covered in grubby bits that stained the paint in the pot.
Beads of sweat were blinding Paul, forcing him to wipe his brow with his sleeve. He was boiling. It was not working, so he tried again, putting so much paint on the brush that he might as well have poured it straight onto the ground. Sure enough, the letters started to form. He had managed her first name and made it as far as the “V” when the first drops of rain began to fall, setting him back once again.
Acrylic. Water-soluble.
It was not going to hold. The shower suddenly intensified, reducing his effort to a watercolour. Paul tried to fix it, correct it, fill in the blurs, catch the letters, but the rain carried on falling mercilessly on the pavement, bouncing up and forming rivulets that carried the white away. Paul tried and tried again, like a stubborn fool, but he knew he had been defeated. Before him stretched a vast, runny, off-white puddle that was rapidly heading for the gutter. The sewers would be oblivious to the hope they were gulping down. On his knees on the pavement, the paintbrush clenched in his fist, Paul heard his friend calling to him. A car was coming – time to hit the road. He stood up, recovered the pot and went back to the Volkswagen, his shoulders slumped and his hair sopping wet. Without so much as a flash of lightning or the hint of a flood, Paul had been defeated by a measly downpour.
He collapsed into the passenger seat in silence. Denis said nothing either as he turned the key in the engine and slid the car into first, only for the other car to stop alongside them. As the driver’s window wound down, Paul recognised his father. He lowered his window too. He was not really in the mood for jokes that evening. His father was never in the mood for them. For once, they were on the same page.
“Everything alright?” Rufus asked, his voice suspicious. “What are you doing here at this time? Still spilling out of the clubs?”
It was impossible for words to be uttered with greater disdain. Serge Rufus shook his head contemptuously. When his father sat back blankly to start his engine, Paul could make out a man in the passenger seat nervously sucking on a sweet.
19
In this city, on this investigation, Capestan thought about Paul constantly. She had struggled so much these last months to tear his image away, and now that he was back in full Technicolor, all resistance was futile. Try as she might, she could not free herself from his
broad smile, his tawny eyes, all his golden glory, and any effort she made to draw a veil over him depleted her ability to think straight.
More than in any other inquiry, she was relying on the rest of her team to deduce on her behalf, even if – more than in any other inquiry – the rest of her team was relying on her for the eureka moment. With her head and her heart wedged between two breeze blocks, Capestan was losing her most basic reflexes. She was too preoccupied to keep her defences even a little secure. The spate of traumatic cases she experienced with the Brigade des Mineurs – the ones that caused her own downfall before destroying her marriage – took advantage of her lowered guard to come back to haunt her.
As a young woman, her cheerful, carefree soul had propelled her towards a handsome, funny man. His company had let her bob along the surface of a resplendent sea with the summer sun on her face, but her tenure at the quai des Gesvres had changed that, the darkness rushing up from the shadowy depths to grab her ankles and pull her down, down, down. She had swallowed her fair share of water as her arms spun round like the vanes of a windmill. All in silence.
He had left her, then she had left the Brigade des Mineurs. Ever since, she had been on an even keel, her new squad serving as a breakwater. The unhappy endings and grim news flashes had become a distant memory. But mental health is not something to be toyed with. Paul’s return was stirring up turbulent waters that would either spit her back onto terra firma or upend her for good. Capestan had no idea which it would be.
*
The rest of the troops managed to join them in the afternoon. Lebreton, Rosière, Lewitz, Dax, Merlot, Évrard and Saint-Lô were bunched at the foot of Velowski’s building. The dry, bracing cold had taken them by surprise. With the exception of Lebreton and Orsini, they were stamping their feet on the pavement to warm up. Rosière had equipped Pilou with a scarf. As the officers chatted, a cloud of condensation mixed with their cigarette smoke, cloaking the delegation.
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