“A pretension is . . . an ambition that you . . . can’t attain. I’ll get there on . . . the third . . . lap.”
“It’ll be dark by then.”
The setting sun was already lengthening their shadows and reddening the few clouds floating in the sky.
“When you get there . . . it’ll be dark,” Gilles boasted.
“And you think that’s not pretension?”
“No . . . it’s worse . . .it’s . . . braggadocio.”
When they finished the first lap, the sun had disappeared behind Le Canigou. The little beach along the lake was deserted.
“Do many people come here in the summer?” Julie asked.
“In July and August, lots of Catalans leave the seaside to the tourists and prefer to come here. There are a few open-air cafes and bars and under the pine groves there are concrete barbecues where families come for ‘grill parties.’ Cooking meat over an open fire is one of the Catalans’ favorite leisure activities; it’s almost a sport, and even sometimes a cultural expression.” Julie grasped her left foot and pulled it up along her thigh to stretch her quadriceps.
“It’s too late for a second lap, I think.”
“Shoot,” Gilles said, with an unfeigned frown of satisfaction.
He bent over forward. His hands slowly descended to his feet. Julie, stretching her other leg, asked the question she’d been holding back for a long time.
“Not in the best of shape, huh?”
“I haven’t been sleeping very well . . .” he replied, after slowly straightening his back.
“You’re probably not taking the right potions . . .”
Gilles put his right leg in front of him and raised his foot toward his ankle. Stretching his calf.
“What do you mean by that?”
“What do you think?”
Julie stretched her left arm over her head and pushed on her elbow with her right hand. Stretching the triceps. Gilles was still limbering the muscles in his calves. His dark eyes were fixed on the horizon of the lake, which would soon disappear into the night.
“I don’t understand . . .”
“Of course you do . . .”
Gilles was no longer trying to fool her, only to put off saying it. He was ready.
“I’ve got a sharp nose, you know,” Julie went on. “You smell of alcohol, you’re sweating it out, it’s emerging from all your pores. If Jacques were here, he’d say that this evening it was more like we were running in the back room of a bistro than out in the country.”
Julie surprised herself. She’d already adopted the technique fashionable at the Perpignan police headquarters, namely, attributing to Molina everything one wanted to say that was too crude or vulgar. Fortunately, his broad shoulders could bear all that!
Sebag still hadn’t reacted. As if he hadn’t heard anything she’d said. But he was still stretching the same calf.
“I hope you have friends to talk to when you’re feeling bad,” she said.
She stretched her quadriceps again and put her hand on Sebag’s shoulder to keep her balance and to establish a kind of connection between them.
“We don’t know each other well, and I understand that you may well not want to tell me what’s wrong.”
She changed legs and put her other hand on Gilles’s shoulder. He trembled.
“But I want to tell you a secret, if that’s okay with you.”
Sebag remained mute for a few long seconds before finally answering:
“I’ll be a silent as the tomb.”
“You’d better! Otherwise . . . you’ll be one—a tomb, that is! Do you remember our conversation that other day in the hospital parking lot, after our interview with Sandrine Valls?”
“Uhh . . . yes.”
Gilles didn’t seem sure, so she decided to refresh his memory.”
“You asked me if I had a boyfriend, and do you remember what I said?”
Sebag frowned, he was making an effort to remember.
“Oh, yes, you said ‘almost.’”
“That’s right . . .”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
Their eyes met, were frightened.
“I know. But I want to.”
She took a deep breath and leaned harder on his shoulder.
“I don’t have a boyfriend but a girlfriend. Her name is Marina and we’ve been living together for five years. There, I’ve said it! You’re the only one at headquarters who knows.”
Their eyes met again, spoke to each other. In Gilles’s eyes, Julie saw first surprise, a surprise elicited not by the content of her admission but by the admission itself. Then she discerned an emptiness, a fear, hesitation. Then their color changed, and a surrender emerged in them, little by little.
Gilles’s lips parted and as the darkness deepened, he finally spoke.
CHAPTER 32
He turned over in bed. A cold wind was blowing through the dark little room. He pulled the covers up over his shoulders.
He was having trouble sleeping. His fears were coming back.
His revenge couldn’t stop there. Out of the question. There was still so much to do, so many guilty people who deserved punishment . . . And so many victims who needed him to finally reawaken.
The Christmas holidays had served his ends magnificently. He hadn’t foreseen that. It was a great surprise, wonderful news. An unexpected gift. Probably the best Christmas present he’d ever received. He almost burst out laughing but restrained himself.
This wasn’t the time.
The police had made some connections and drawn some parallels he hadn’t anticipated. However, that Lieutenant Ménard hadn’t seemed so swift. His colleague was more alarming, but fortunately this Gilles Sebag wasn’t as good as he was supposed to be.
He was going to have to play a closer game than he’d expected. He didn’t want to get caught. Not now. It was too early. Much too early. He hadn’t finished. The Eye had other ongoing cases that had to be wrapped up.
He stretched out on his back. Put his hands on his protuberant belly. Listened to his breathing.
Despite his workouts—three times a week, on average—he was getting heavier. Inexorably. His wife had already reproached him for that, before. But what could he do? He spent too much time in front of screens.
He put these pointless thoughts out of his mind. He had to remain focused. His mission occupied his mind, and that was as it should be.
Everything was ready for the next step. He wasn’t going to stop when things were going so well. For months, he’d been gathering data, keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior and faces, comparing, cross-checking. It was an enormous task to know everything. Everything about everything . . .
All while remaining invisible.
Now that he was reaping the fruit of this labor, he couldn’t stop there. And especially not let himself be stopped. In any case, the police had nothing on him.
Absolutely nothing.
He felt a kind of shiver. His broadly deployed antennae were picking up vague waves that made him optimistic. The fetid breath of a new drama was floating over Perpignan.
It would happen tomorrow. Tomorrow at the latest.
CHAPTER 33
Sebag lowered the sun visor. He was driving on the fast road to Canet and the sunlight reflected off the sea was burning his retinas. As he passed by the Europa swimming pool he vowed to finally take up swimming. The outside Olympic pool was one of the few in France that was open year-round, and he had never really taken advantage of that. Claire, on the other hand, went there regularly. One year, in February, she had even sunburned her back.
Claire . . .
He had to not think about her, above all not think about her.
His discussion with Julie the day before had done him good. He’d slept well. For once. And without having drunk any more.
Gilles hadn’t seen it coming. When his colleague had begun talking to him about alcohol, he’d suddenly stiffened, closed up like a clam: who did she think she was, this girl, to preach at him like that? And then there had been that warmth on his shoulder, the trust, and that magnificent gift. Julie’s secret. Like a hand held out to him from beyond modesty. He’d lost himself for a moment in the sweetness of her bright eyes and had no longer perceived anything but their breathing in unison. His lines of defense collapsed. He’d been keeping too many things bottled up inside himself, and for too long.
At Canet-Plage, the market was in full swing, despite the early hour. At this time of year, the seaside resort was inhabited mainly by retirees. They went out early to do their shopping and to warm their sagging skins and old bones in the first rays of the sun. Afterward, they walked along the beach promenade, alone or in couples, a loving dog sometimes replacing a deceased spouse.
Sebag parked in an underground parking garage. Made to hold the summer crowds, it was now almost empty, and he found a spot right near the pedestrian exit. He sat down on the Esplanade de la Méditerranée and ordered an espresso. He was early. With his face offered up to the sun’s caress, he sipped this first coffee of the day. To the south, the Albères range, the last mountainous rampart before Spain, prevented a foamy tide from spreading over Roussillon. Everywhere else, the sky was a sovereign blue.
Sebag closed his eyes. Take advantage of the present, savor every happy moment, and stop thinking about the past and making plans for the future. Those were the rules he had to follow.
Nathalie Llop soon joined him. She was a small, plump brunette. She sat down at his side rather than across from him: she, too, wanted to enjoy the sun and the panorama. Sebag began by asking her about her relations with Didier Valls, her colleague and confidant.
“We liked each other . . . we were friends. There was never any ambiguity between us. I’d known him for only ten years, but it was as if we’d grown up together. Or been brother and sister.”
Nathalie and Didier often lunched together. Their conversations resembled the content of the text messages he’d read: they talked about everything and nothing, a little about their jobs, a lot about their lives and their problems.
“Didier was a chronic depressive, he was anxious. He was very fragile psychologically.”
She was surprised and pained to learn of the corbeau’s existence.
“I thought we told each other everything! I knew that he had doubts about his wife’s love for him, but I didn’t know that he’d learned about this relationship with another man.”
“A platonic relationship,” Sebag added.
She shrugged.
“What difference does that make since she no longer loved him and wanted to leave him?”
“For her, it’s important.”
“If that’s true, then I understand him.”
She stopped a moment and then went on before Sebag had asked another question.
“In any case, it was clear that such revelations would make him do something foolish. I think that in a less depressive period, he might have been aggressive toward her. But here he turned his violence against himself.”
“Why didn’t he tell you about it, do you think?’
“I have no idea. Really, I have no idea.”
She took out a Kleenex and sniffled.
“If he’d talked to me about it, I could have prevented him from doing something so stupid.”
Sebag mentioned the guard’s dismissal. Nathalie remembered having learned about it from labor union handouts. She‘d also read the management’s reply in an account of a meeting of the employees’ delegates.
“Didier hadn’t ever talked to you about it?”
“No.”
She’d poked her nose toward her coffee cup as she answered. Gilles waited.
“I tried to talk with him about it on several occasions, but he always refused to discuss it.”
Sebag didn’t conceal his surprise.
“I don’t understand. Why did you ask Didier about this? It was Abad who was at the origin of the dismissal, wasn’t it?”
She ran her finger over a carefully plucked eyebrow bisected by a small scar.
“There was always something odd about that business . . .”
Nathalie fell silent again. She stopped massaging her eyebrow. Her hand slipped through her hair and stopped at the barrette that held it back. Sebag calmly urged her to go on.
“What was it?”
“Dominique Barrache knew Stéphane and Didier. They played pool together. And I think they played for money. I believe there had been debt problems among them.“
Sebag held his breath. The guard had just moved from being the only suspect to suspect number one. A semantic detail, but a major advance in a police investigation.
His investigation had just taken a giant step forward. François Ménard should have been delighted, but his joy was tempered by pique. Once again it was that damned Gilles who was the source of the most recent advance. A prodigious stroke of luck . . .
They were back in the house in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Salanque. He, Gilles, and Jacques. With Barrache, obviously. They had obtained a search warrant from the prosecutor and carried out a full search. But they found nothing. Not a single handwritten note with writing resembling that of the corbeau; no burner phone, no compromising photo in the numerous albums, nothing but pictures of flowers, animals, and landscapes. Not even newspaper clippings that might suggest that the guard had followed closely the misadventures of his former billiard partners.
“You won’t find anything here!” Barrache moaned.
He was standing in the main room, his hands cuffed behind his back, and only occasionally raised his head.
“Oh, yeah . . . You already threw everything away?” Molina barked in his face. “You know that that’s a kind of confession, don’t you?”
Barrache opened his eyes wide with fright. Molina was doing a great job of playing the bulldog’s role. Ménard broke in:
“Why didn’t you tell us from the outset that you played pool with Valls and Abad?”
“Because I was sure you’d take me away . . .”
“Did you think we’d never find out?”
“I hoped . . . I’ve just found a job! It’s not exactly ideal to be in police custody while you’re in the trial period!”
“Bravo, you succeeded!” Molina growled. “You bet that we were dopes and you lost. Now be a good sport and tell us everything. Why were you so angry at these two guys?”
“I . . . wasn’t angry with them.”
“That’s right, go on taking us for fools. Abad and Valls got you fired and you gave them chocolates for Christmas, is that it?”
Molina slowly rolled up his sleeves and gazed down on the suspect from his 6’3” height. Barrache shriveled. His life-buoy waist doubled in volume.
“Yes, of course I was angry with them! What I meant was that I wasn’t angry with them to the point of sending them anonymous letters. How would I have known about their women?”
“That’s exactly what we’d like you to tell us. Were you out of a job for long?”
“Four months.”
“That gave you quite a lot of free time to spy on their women. It’s not very hard, after all, to trail two women in a hurry to go get laid by their lovers: when they’ve got hot pants they’re less vigilant, right?”
Barrache looked desperately at his feet. Molina crossed his arms over his chest.
“I asked you a question. It wasn’t very hard, was it?”
“I didn’t take those photos,” Barrache stammered.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of them, they’re good photos. Professional work!”
“It wasn’t me!”
His tone was becoming plaintive. Molina clipped him under th
e chin to make him look up.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to start blubbering now!”
He turned to his colleagues.
“The guard’s trade is going to hell. They’re hiring even wimps.”
Jacques grabbed Barrache’s chin and forced him to hold his head up.
“You must have been delighted when you heard that Valls had committed suicide. And what about Abad? I hope that there you felt some remorse, all the same, when you found out that he’d killed his old lady. She hadn’t done anything to you, Christine . . .”
Since Barrache still wasn’t answering, Molina pinched his cheek hard. The guard tried to resist.
“But . . . you don’t have the right to hit me . . .”
“I didn’t hit you.”
Molina gave him a resounding slap on the left cheek.
“There, now I’ve hit you. You see, it’s not the same thing. Mustn’t confuse that,” he said, giving him another pinch, “with this.”
Molina raised his arm.
“Take it easy,” Ménard said.
Molina lowered his arm. He had a carnivorous smile on his lips.
“Where was I? Oh, yes . . . I was saying that you’re in deep shit. We have two dead bodies on our hands. And in both cases we’ve found photos. You’re a photographer—a pretty good one—and you had it in for the two guys responsible for these deaths. Moreover, you’re a wimp, a coward.”
He raised his hand again, ready to strike. Barrache ducked his head.
“You see . . . You’re a coward. A real man would have settled his scores directly with Abad and Valls. But a coward prefers to attack their wives and send anonymous letters.“
“I didn’t do that, I swear it, I didn’t do it.”
“You’re really getting on my nerves, you know that?”
He hit him again. On the right cheek this time. Barrache shot the other policemen looks begging them to intervene. Ménard decided it was time to move to the following stage. Molina had tenderized the meat enough.
“Why don’t you go have a smoke, Jacques, just to relax a little.”
Molina pretended to think about it and then went down the stairway. Downstairs, he didn’t fail to slam the door. Ménard took the cuffs off Barrache and asked him to sit down.
Crimes of Winter Page 25
