Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  The Eye had achieved the exploit he had so long waited for, so hoped for, so prepared for.

  His mission was not over.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ah, so there you are! I was beginning to think you were dead. Actually, now that I see the way you look, I wonder if you’re not . . .”

  Jacques Molina and François Ménard were getting ready to leave the hotel when they met Gilles Sebag in the lobby.

  “I’m feeling a little queasy,” Sebag said to excuse himself.

  “Hmm . . . And does that keep you from answering the telephone?”

  “You won’t believe this, but I couldn’t find it.”

  Molina stared at his colleague, wondering whether he wasn’t deliberately messing with him.

  “In fact, I’d left it in my running bag,” Sebag explained. “I’d gone on a long run over by Baixas last evening, and I got back pretty late. I was worn out, and I don’t know what I ate afterward, but I had diarrhea part of the night and all morning.”

  Molina shook his head. Gilles looked sad. Whatever he ate must have reached its expiration date at the time of General de Gaulle, the London period rather than the Colombey period.

  “You run at night?” Molina asked, astonished.

  “Sometimes. I have a headlamp. But in those cases I avoid trails and stay on the asphalt. But why didn’t you try calling me on the landline?”

  Molina frowned. Once again, he had the impression that they were making fun of him. Very good at discovering other people’s deceptions, Sebag turned out to be a pitiful liar. He had learned to invent countless pretexts to justify being late, or even absent, but he usually reserved them for his direct superior, Superintendent Castello, who consented to believe them.

  “That’s right, that was stupid, we didn’t even think about it,” Ménard conceded.

  Molina remained pensive.

  “So, this case, uhh . . . what’s it about?” Sebag asked.

  “‘A tragedy of jealousy,’ tomorrow’s papers might call it,” Ménard replied. “The husband killed his wife in the hotel room where she had just spent two hours with her lover.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Yeah, even these days that remains a major classic,” Molina added. “So you could have spent the whole day on the toilet . . .”

  “And the . . . lover was no longer there?”

  “No, he’d already left,” Ménard answered. “The owner of the hotel unequivocally identified the husband in a photo. We haven’t succeeded in contacting him, but we’re going to put out a notice that we’re looking for him, and we’ll also send a patrol car to his home and his workplace.”

  “We‘re also going to interrogate the lover,” Molina added. “He’s supposed to come to headquarters. Do you want us to wait for you?”

  “If you want, sure . . . I don’t know. It’s your call, in fact. For the moment, I’m going to have a look around up there instead.”

  “Elsa is waiting for you with . . . impatience. It’s on the fourth floor.”

  Without responding to Molina’s mockery, Sebag disappeared into the stairwell.

  Elsa Moulin took off her cap, shook out her hair, and kissed Gilles hello.

  “Oh là là, you’re all pale! Are you ill?”

  “A little queasy, yes.”

  As she approached him, the young woman had noticed an unusual sour odor, an odor of perspiration. She thought for a moment that with this case, Gilles must not have had time to take a shower after he ran. But she rejected that hypothesis. Gilles’s tired-looking face spoke for itself: he was in no state to run.

  “Gastroenteritis?”

  “Don’t know.”

  A little voice piped up in Sebag’s shirt pocket: “Papa, you’ve got a message!”

  “Excuse me, it’s an SMS.”

  “Amusing way to announce it.”

  “My daughter recorded that for me and I don’t know how to get rid of it. I look stupid, sometimes.”

  “I find it charming.”

  “Yes, but when you’re trying to look like a hard guy to break a hoodlum and your telephone suddenly calls you ‘papa,’ it pretty much ruins everything. You don’t scare anybody anymore!”

  “I can imagine.”

  Sebag quickly read the message and put away his phone. He remained pensive for some time.

  “Bad news?”

  Gilles looked up.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bad news?”

  “Uhh . . . no, no. My wife who . . . I’ve got to buy bread on the way home tonight. Nothing out of the ordinary!”

  He made a quick tour of the bedroom and bathroom before having a look at the body. Then he looked out the window.

  “The street is calm and the buildings look quiet,” Elsa said. “No point in expecting much from witnesses there. But in any case you don’t really need them.”

  “Jacques and François gave me a quick rundown. So everything is crystal clear?”

  “I think so. No need to canvass the neighbors this time.”

  “Oof. I think that’s one of the things I like least about this job: I feel like the sales rep for a product that no one really cares about. As soon as they have a problem, people come to weep on our shoulders. But when they don’t need us, they immediately revert to the ancestral antipathy they have for uniforms. It bugs them to have to help us, and they don’t even try to hide it. Ah, well, that’s how it is. So, anyway, this investigation isn’t very exciting!”

  Sebag’s disillusioned tone astonished Elsa.

  “Whoa, you’re really out of sorts today . . .”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  Gilles avoided looking her in the eye.

  “You look really queasy,” she said sympathetically. “And just before the holidays. That’s bad luck.”

  Sebag gave her a strangely sweet smile. A sad smile, Elsa thought.

  “Well, that way I won’t put on too much weight.”

  “Oh, you don’t have any real problems in that regard.”

  “Because I watch myself! But at my age, one minute of inattention and wham, you get rolls of fat.”

  “Nonsense! You’re just right.”

  Gilles’s smile became happier.

  “You’re too sweet.”

  Jordi Estève pulled the chain on the toilet. Damned prostate! It seemed to him that he spent half his days in the bathroom. And the other half buttoning up his pants . . . What a stupid idea to go back to the fashion of button-up pants, when there was no finer invention that the zipper . . . Forty times a day that thought came to him. Damned prostate, indeed.

  Back in the lobby, he found a man standing in front of the framed photographs hung on the walls. He was a policeman, Jordi had seen him talking with the other two. He coughed. Not because he wanted to attract the guy’s attention but because he really had a frog in his throat, so deep down in fact that he wondered if the confounded thing wasn’t croaking in his bronchial tubes instead. Or did he have throat cancer? His granddaughter kept pestering him to go to the hospital and have some tests done. He told her that at his age, you had to die of something or other.

  The policeman turned to him.

  “Not bad, your photos.”

  “Thanks. My grandfather was a photographer. Most of the pictures of the city around the turn of the last century are his.”

  “Congratulations . . .”

  The policeman came up to him and held out his hand.

  “I haven’t introduced myself. Lieutenant Sebag. Yes, nice photos. And also very useful.”

  “They provide good decoration, I think.”

  “The arrangement is unusual.”

  “People often tell me that, but I like it this way.”

  “Yes, very useful,” Sebag repeated. “Especially for hiding the traces of damp-rot from the g
uests.”

  Old Jordi couldn’t help smiling.

  “Are you finally going to tell me what happened to Christine?”

  The man, very upset, refused to sit down. François Ménard and Jacques Molina had let him stew in his worries for half an hour in the lobby of police headquarters. Long enough to make the pressure rise considerably, but also for them to drink the coffee they hadn’t had time to drink after lunch. When they got back from the Carlit, their favorite greasy spoon, they had Christine Abad’s lover brought into one of the rooms reserved for interrogations. Sebag had just joined them and sat down in a corner of the room, telling them to conduct the interrogation as if he weren’t there.

  “What’s all this business about a murder?”

  The man’s blue eyes jumped with concern and anger from one inspector to the other. Molina consulted Ménard with a look before going ahead.

  “Christine Abad has been murdered.”

  The lover’s face fell.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Do I look like it?”

  “How . . . how is that possible?”

  “Sit down.”

  “Who killed her? When and how?”

  “Sit down,” Ménard commanded in turn. “Please.”

  This time the man obeyed. Mechanically. The two inspectors sat down on the other side of a little square table. Ménard laid his notebook in front of him.

  “Let’s proceed in an orderly way, if you please.”

  “What happened exactly?” the lover persisted.

  “We will tell you when the time comes, but for now, we are the ones who are going to ask the questions. Last name, first name, age and occupation.”

  “But . . . is she . . . is she really dead?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ménard replied, with the sobriety of a policeman used to the incredulity of family and friends when faced with this kind of information. “We would like you to answer our questions: last name, first name, age, and occupation.”

  The man tried to protest again, but when he saw the determined faces of the policemen he finally bowed his head.

  “Balland, Éric, 52, sound engineer. I work at the Archipel Theater.”

  “Are you married?”

  Balland acquiesced silently.

  “Do you have children?”

  “Yes . . . three.”

  In Balland’s voice Molina had recognized a different southern accent.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Bordeaux. I spent most of my life there. I have been in Perpignan for only three years.”

  “Have you known Christine Abad long?”

  “More than a year. We did yoga together.”

  Molina almost snorted, but Ménard didn’t give him time.

  “How long has she been your mistress?”

  Balland wrinkled his forehead, making the two bumps over his arched eyebrows stand out. He stared at the two inspectors one after the other and realized that it was pointless to deny it.

  “About two months.”

  “How did you become lovers?”

  Docilely, Balland recounted the main lines of their affair. The first looks, the first smiles, the first words. The Hôtel du Gecko as well, and their biweekly habits.

  “What was the exact nature of your relationship? I mean, did you love each other?”

  “I don’t understand what your question means.”

  Ménard raised his eyebrows.

  “But it’s clear enough . . .”

  “Then let’s say I don’t see how that is of interest in the framework of an investigation. It’s . . . personal.”

  Despite the shock and pain, Éric Balland had already gotten a grip on himself and was now thinking before he answered. He probably didn’t want to feel himself judged. Since Ménard had fallen silent, Molina took over. In the game they were playing, his role was to refocus the witness. To tenderize the meat, as he liked to put it.

  “It’s up to us to decide which questions we ask.”

  “I told you: it’s personal!”

  “That’s not a real answer, is it?”

  “I have the right to choose what questions I answer. I have come here of my own free will, I’m not in police custody and, I suppose, I’m not a suspect . . .”

  Molina interrupted him: “Does your wife know you’re here?”

  Balland paled.

  “What are you getting at? That’s . . . blackmail!”

  “Already using big words . . . I just wanted to make you understand one thing: the more you put off answering our questions the longer this discussion will last. And the later you get home, the more difficulty you’ll have explaining this delay to your wife. We can also come to your home tomorrow morning to ask you the questions you’ve refused to answer today.”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  Overacting his indifference, Molina shrugged his shoulders.

  “No more than deliberately delaying the work of two poor government officials whose only goal is to identify Christine Abad’s murderer. And whether you loved her or not, I find that absolutely disgusting.”

  “You know very well who killed her . . .”

  “We’ll see about that later,” Ménard said evasively.

  The tension having risen sufficiently, he took over again to reduce it.

  “Let me explain to you, sir, how we proceed in the police. In the course of an interview with a witness, we always ask all kinds of questions. Most of them are pertinent, while others might seem incongruous. Some really are incongruous, but it also sometimes happens that questions that seemed incongruous at the time turn out later to be pertinent.”

  Ménard picked up the pencil he had laid on the table and with a click made the lead project from it.

  “It’s only at the end of the interview that we decide what is important for the investigation and what is not, what we will keep or not in the record of the interview. Thus everything that you are going to say to us will not necessarily be recorded.”

  This beating around the bush annoyed Molina. Were it up to him, he would have taken out his telephone and put in the wife’s telephone number. Then he’d have the guy by the balls.

  “There is no judgment on my part,” Ménard went on. “So I’m going to formulate my question differently: “Did you and Christine plan to leave your spouses and live together?”

  Balland’s eyes opened wide.

  “No! Absolutely not.”

  He realized that his categorical tone might be surprising.

  “There was a great deal of tenderness between us, and a great deal of complicity as well. But . . . to answer your first question, I . . . I did not love her, no, and she didn’t love me, either. That is . . . everything obviously depends on what you understand by this term ‘love.’ We loved the time we spent together, but never, never did we imagine living together. Our affair would probably have lasted a few weeks, or even a few months, and we would both have gone back to our little lives.”

  “Was this the first time you‘d cheated on your wife?”

  The question had burst forth from the corner of the room where, up to now, Sebag had kept quiet. Ménard breathed noisily. Gilles’s clumsy intervention threatened to antagonize the witness again.

  “It was the first time, yes.”

  Balland lifted his strong-willed chin, his square jaw contracted, and his eyes stared unblinking at the policemen. His attitude contrasted with his hesitant tone. Sebag clucked his tongue loudly.

  “Hmph . . .”

  Balland stared at Sebag, and then the other two lieutenants, as if to find out whether he should respond to this onomatopoeia. Molina came to his aid:

  “Consider our colleague a kind of lie detector. In this case, he means he doesn’t believe you at all.”

  Balland ran a finger over his de
licate, small lips. Looking at Ménard alone, he answered:

  “It does not concern me whether he believes me or not. That is my answer, my only answer. You can record it.”

  Ménard made use of this to take over the reins of the conversation.

  “That will be recorded, Monsieur Balland. Now I would like to come back to a remark you made a little while ago. You said: ‘You know very well who killed her.’ What does that sentence mean?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe, but I’d like to hear you say it.”

  “The murderer was her husband. In this kind of thing, it’s obvious!”

  “Christine must have spoken to you about him. Was she afraid of him?”

  “In general, we avoided talking about our spouses when we were together . . . But she did tell me several times that he was irascible and might prove violent if he learned of our . . . our affair. But I didn’t think it could go that far.”

  “Do you know if he had a gun at his home?”

  “Christine told me that he went to a shooting range. With a rifle, I think.”

  “What kind of rifle?”

  “No idea.”

  “Was Christine Abad afraid of her husband?”

  “No, I don’t think you could say that. I think she had never imagined that he might . . . go that far. It’s insane!”

  “Had he already been violent with her?”

  “She never told me anything like that. How was she killed?”

  Ménard pursed his lips before deciding to answer.

  “A bullet to the heart. Probably a .22 long rifle.”

  “Then it’s him, for God’s sake, there’s no doubt! Why are you wasting your time with me? Have you arrested him?”

  “Not yet, but it won’t be long. A search notice has already gone out.”

  Balland took his head in his hands.

  “It’s dreadful. How can anybody be that jealous? To kill his own wife, it’s crazy, it’s crazy! I thought that things like that happened only in films.”

  “You don’t spend enough time in court,” Sebag suggested from his corner. “And what about you, have you asked yourself what you would do if your own wife cheated on you?”