Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  “All the same, he caused two tragedies,” Castello argued. “And we don’t know what his motives are or how many targets he has in mind. Who knows if he has other accusations to make?”

  “Hmm . . . yes. I thought that we had enough work and that we needed to improve our stats. Do you really think it’s necessary to put two inspectors on this lead—which is interesting, to be sure, but uncertain?”

  “That’s for me to decide!” the superintendent shot back. “I’m trying, as best I can, to reconcile two irreconcilable things: presenting good figures to my superiors while at the same time maintaining a humane, effective, and vigilant police force. François, have you already thought about the leads to be followed?”

  “Sandrine Valls called me this weekend. She wasn’t at home, but with her . . . friend. She’s expecting us today for a search of the apartment to look for any possible photos. I gave her no details, I remained vague and I didn’t mention Abad, thinking that wasn’t useful.”

  Ménard glanced at Sebag out of the corner of his eye, as if he were seeking his approval. Only Castello nodded.

  “Then we’ll have to go to the Cantalou factory to question the victims’ co-workers. The victims, that is, of the corbeau,18 we might say, since Stéphane Abad is not exactly a victim . . .”

  “What about him, do you plan to question him again?”

  “I don’t think that would be very helpful. After having lied, he decided not to answer our questions any longer. I’m afraid he hasn’t changed his mind.”

  Ménard glanced again at Gilles, who remained stolid.

  “And finally we still have to examine the telephones. We have Christine Abad’s phone in our possession, and soon we’ll have Didier Valls’s phone as well. Stéphane threw his in the Têt, but I plan to subpoena his phone records. We won’t be able to recover the content of the messages, but we can get a list of his calls. On the back of a photo the informer wrote: ‘You know how to reach me.’ We can thus legitimately suppose that they had already called each other.”

  “If the guy isn’t an idiot, he’ll have used a burner phone,” Castello objected.

  “That’s possible. But we can still geolocate his calls.”

  Castello closed the Abad-Valls file and picked up the other papers.

  “Fine, I’ll leave it to you. We may be wasting our time on this case, but that’s a luxury I still want to allow us from time to time.”

  In the car, Sebag carefully reread Stéphane Abad’s deposition, because he already remembered it only in part. His brain wasn’t retaining much right now. After he finished, he called Elsa Moulin. The head of the forensic police had just returned from vacation.

  “Do you remember the telephone I gave you ten days ago?”

  “Of course.”

  “It has just become one of your post-vacation priorities. And I’m going to have another one for you.”

  “Yes, sir, Boss. I’ll deliver all their secrets to you by, say . . . end of day tomorrow?”

  “Perfect.”

  A man opened the door of the Vallses’ apartment. Although he was fat, he held himself as straightly and proudly as a retired colonel in the gendarmerie. He introduced himself:

  “Francis Hubert . . . a friend.”

  With his mocking eyes and his chubby cheeks that compressed his small mouth, this “friend” looked like a satisfied piglet. Without understanding why, Sebag took an immediate dislike to him. However, Francis, for his part, had been able to be patient and well-behaved with his “mistress,” limiting himself for long weeks to the latter’s sweet words and tender kisses.

  “Come in, inspectors,” Sandrine called from behind her friend Francis. “I’m sorry, I didn’t find anything. In any case, not yet.”

  She had been looking for only an hour, she explained. When she got out of the hospital, she had moved in with Francis and had come only twice to this apartment, which, moreover, she planned to sell soon, along with all the furniture of her past. Sebag noticed that she had nonetheless found time to carefully straighten up the living room that her husband had ravaged before jumping to his death. Accompanied by Ménard, Sebag followed her to the office that she and Didier had set up in a room next to their bedroom. They shared the computer.

  “We’ll have to take that with us,” Ménard informed her.

  “Go ahead, go ahead, it was mainly Didier who used it. I, you know, computers . . .”

  A file cabinet sat next to the desk with its drawers open. Sandrine had taken out the files. She had examined all of them.

  “I didn’t find any photo or document suggesting that Didier had been informed of my . . . connection with Francis.”

  Sebag understood that if a woman as orderly as she was had found nothing in this office, that was because there was nothing to find.

  “Do you have a recycling bin for paper and cardboard?”

  “That’s a good idea, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  She led them to the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink. Two blue bins stood there side by side. She pointed to the one on the right. It was full. Sebag emptied the contents on the floor and then examined each paper, which he then put in the trash bin. He found nothing but advertising flyers, packaging, and an old issue of La Semaine du Roussillon.

  Sebag stood up and rejoined Sandrine, who was inspecting with Ménard the last room—a guest room—in the apartment.

  “So you confirm that at the time of the argument with your husband, he told you he knew everything?” Gilles asked. “‘Everything’ was the exact term he used?”

  “Yes. He even repeated it several times.”

  “And he didn’t explain what he meant by ‘everything?’”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. I thought he was just saying that to get me to tell him the truth. Especially since nothing had happened with Francis . . .”

  This inappropriate, even suspicious insistence annoyed him. Sandrine had loved another man whom she met and kissed as soon as her husband turned his back. Could she say that nothing had happened on the pretext that they hadn’t slept together? Was adultery only a matter of sex? He thought again about his own situation and how much the tenderness that emerged from Claire’s conversations with her lover had hurt him.

  “And you don’t know how Didier might have been informed of your . . . friendship?”

  Ménard had taken over the questioning.

  “No. As I told you, I thought he was bluffing and that he didn’t know anything.”

  “Your husband knew Stéphane Abad, I believe?”

  Sandrine’s face darkened.

  “Yes. They played pool together once or twice a week. I learned what he did, it’s awful! My God, poor Christine!”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not really. We ran into each other from time to time, but our husbands preferred to meet without us. And then we didn’t become close friends, the two of us. All the same . . . Poor Christine.”

  She ran her hand over her lips. Her chin was trembling. “She probably imagines that she might have met with the same fate,” Sebag mused before correcting himself, sarcastically: “Oh, right, she didn’t do anything!”

  “Could you give us your husband’s mobile phone?” Ménard asked.

  He hadn’t asked any other questions about Abad. That was a good thing. Shortly, at the Cantalou factory, it would be time to be more precise. Sandrine handed over the mobile. It was off; the battery was probably dead.

  “It’s almost new and I was going to give it to my grand-nephew, but perhaps that can wait.”

  The lieutenants exchanged a glance but said nothing. There was no point in telling her now that the phone would be impounded and that she would probably never get it back.

  “You’re not saying anything, aren’t you convinced by this business?”

  His colleague’s silence irrita
ted François Ménard. He had the impression that Gilles was mad at him about what he’d done, and that bothered his conscience.

  “I’m waiting to find out more. For the moment, we have only hypotheses.”

  Ménard’s hands gripped the wheel tighter. He thought again about the many occasions on which the whole team had been mobilized to follow Gilles’s wild imaginings.

  “They don’t explain Abad’s lies,” Sebag went on. “And then there’s something in your reasoning that bothers me a little . . . I didn’t mention it in front of the boss a little while ago so as not to put you in a difficult position, that’s not my way . . .”

  Ménard had his confirmation: this little jab was significant, Gilles was mad at him.

  “I’m listening . . .”

  “Accusations of adultery are usually made to hurt the lovers, not the husbands.”

  Sebag was really taking him for an imbecile . . . He, too, had thought that at first. And then he’d found the response, the argument.

  “The first person to suffer from an infidelity is the spouse, isn’t it? That is even truer these days, moreover. Since 1975 adultery is no longer a crime. But if there are no longer any guilty parties, there are still victims.”

  He was proud of his formula, and shot a sideways glance at his colleague, who was sitting in the passenger seat with his eyes fixed on the road in front of him; he made no reply. No doubt his formula was a good one, Ménard thought, it had struck home.

  “Today, Valls is dead and Abad is in prison. If the corbeau had it in for them, the result may have gone far beyond his hopes.”

  Since Sebag still said nothing, Ménard asked:

  “Don’t you agree with me?”

  “Yes, yes . . .”

  He saw his colleague settle deeper into his seat and frown. He wouldn’t have expected him to be such a bad sport. It’s true that he wasn’t used to being put in his place like that.

  Satisfied with himself, Ménard left the north arterial, taking the airport/hospital exit. Founded in Pyrénées-Orientales in the nineteenth century, the Cantalou-Cémoi company now had thirteen factories throughout the world, but its headquarters remained in Perpignan. The firm had recently left its historic but shabby buildings on the road to Thuir and moved into a new, cocoa-colored factory near the airport. A young personnel director received them and escorted them throughout their visit.

  After two hours, they had drawn up a complex profile of Stéphane Abad. A very skilled professional, very effective and competent, but demanding in a way that did not make everyone happy. Thanks to the entry badge that each employee held, they had been able to discover that Abad had come to work as usual at 9 A.M. and abruptly left again a few minutes later, explaining that his wife had fainted and that he had to go home immediately.

  Didier Valls’s personality seemed to have been considerably paler. With the exception of a secretary who gave a favorable description of the accountant, nobody had much to say about him. “Likeable,” and “discreet” were the words they most often used.

  Ménard thought he perceived hesitations when he asked some of the employees whether anyone in the company might hold a grudge against the two men. Hesitations and fleeting glances in the direction of the personnel director. Each time, François turned to Gilles, who never reacted. Not the slightest click of the tongue.

  He finally realized that the most famous lie detector in the department had put himself in sleep mode. Gilles had stopped asking questions and was not even listening to the answers. He seemed to be elsewhere. Obviously, when he wasn’t the one who found the lead interesting . . .

  Before leaving Ménard decided to make a frontal attack on the personnel director. He didn’t usually do that kind of thing, but he had seen that Sebag sometimes got good results with that tactic.

  “Why doesn’t anyone want to tell me who had recently quarreled with Abad and Valls?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Sebag opened his eyes wide and then stared at Ménard and the personnel director.

  “No, I don’t have the slightest idea,” the latter protested. “Didier Valls committed suicide and Stéphane Abad killed his wife, I don’t see why you’re trying to stir up trouble here with your completely irrelevant questions.”

  “They are relevant.”

  “I really don’t see how.”

  “I am not obliged to tell you, but you are obliged to answer my question. Otherwise I’ll come back tomorrow with my colleagues to question your three hundred employees one by one and go through your files. Then we’ll be likely to stir up trouble for sure!”

  The young personnel director’s determination was beginning to weaken. He readjusted his tie.

  “Without revealing any secrets,” Ménard bluffed, “I can tell you that we fear a third tragedy in your firm. So if you have anything to say to us, say it right now.”

  Ménard couldn’t help glancing with satisfaction at Sebag. Turning back to the personnel director, he added:

  “Please tell us, I’m sure it will be very interesting.”

  16USAP (Union sportive arlequins perpignanais) is a rugby team in Perpignan.

  17Jean-Paul Belmondo, a well-known French actor who often played a tough cop.

  18In French, corbeau means “raven,” but it is also used to refer to a snitch or malicious informer. This figurative meaning later plays a role in the story.

  CHAPTER 23

  He had to admit that there had been some failures. Everything hadn’t gone exactly as it was supposed to. He had sometimes lacked psychology.

  It didn’t matter much.

  The victims were to blame for their misfortune. He couldn’t help that. He’d only exposed their weaknesses. Collateral damage, as military men call it.

  Nonetheless, he had to redouble his prudence. The main risk, as he knew, was haste. About that he had no doubts. Patience had been the key to his successes up to this point. Patience, along with perseverance, memory, and intuition.

  And hate.

  His mission had occupied his mind. He was obliged to stay focused, using all the resources of his brain to incorporate the data, to compile them, to eliminate false paths. To compare. And he had to do all that while remaining discreet and invisible.

  The Eye had helped him a great deal. Without it, nothing would have been possible.

  He swallowed a mouthful of hot coffee. It was his third cup. He needed at least that much to be able to see things clearly. He felt more tired since he’d begun sleeping better. Curious . . . his nerves were probably relaxing . . .

  He was methodically carrying out his work, and that way he would not be stopped. The Eye was invisible, and must remain invisible right to the end. What end? He perceived that he’d never asked himself that question. He had a mission to accomplish, a vengeance to take . . . But when would it stop?

  When he decided it would, when he felt like it.

  Not now. No, not yet.

  That was the right answer, the only possible answer.

  Taking his revenge had finally calmed him after months of internal tempest. He was not going to stop when things were going so well.

  The cops were making progress. They might have found a lead. He himself was surprised that he wasn’t scared.

  He finished his coffee and threw the paper cup in the trash bin. Another workday was beginning. It might bring him something new, a new hope. In a little while he would pick up his camera and his new mobile phone and set out in search of a new exploit.

  That was all he lived for now.

  CHAPTER 24

  An area salvaged from former swamps, Salanca is an unusual part of Roussillon. As flat as a tortilla, its orchards, vineyards, and artichoke fields stretch as far as its long beaches of golden sand. Sitting in the passenger seat, Sebag was watching the lan
dscape pass by. Ménard soon left the D83 highway and headed for Saint-Laurent.

  They easily found the place they were looking for, a small village house on a one-way lane. On the ground floor was a former shop that had been transformed into a garage. On the faded sign one could still make out the words Boulangerie Coll.19 On the upper floor, the shutters were closed.

  Ménard rang the doorbell. Several times. No response.

  He dialed the telephone numbers the personnel director had given them. The policemen hadn’t called in advance, wanting to have the advantage of surprise. Reaching the mobile’s voice mail, Ménard immediately hung up. When he dialed the landline number, they could hear the phone ringing behind the shutters upstairs.

  “Nobody. What shall we do?”

  “What do you suggest?” Ménard replied evasively.

  “We could question the neighbors to find out if our guy left for a long time, but they might snitch on us and warn him.”

  “We don’t have to tell them that we’re cops.”

  Sebag looked at his colleague’s long gray raincoat. He himself was wearing a leather jacket and jeans.

  “No, we don’t . . .”

  Ménard had seen where Gilles was looking.

  “Well, yeah . . . There’s no hurry. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Sebag opened the door on the mailbox. There was hardly any mail. Dominique Barrache had not been gone very long.

  Not without reluctance and a careful choice of words, the young personnel director had finally put them on the trail of a former guard at the company who had been fired six months earlier for serious misconduct. Stéphane Abad had repeatedly faulted him for his behavior during his nighttime vigils. Barrache spent more time looking at his computer screen than at the surveillance cameras. And he didn’t always make his appointed rounds.

  “Shall we go back?” Sebag asked hopefully.

  “I was thinking that we still have time to go by Pollestres to question Abad’s neighbors.”

  “Go by Pollestres? That’s on the other side of Perpignan!”