Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  “What exactly happened between you, Abad, and Valls?”

  The guard collapsed on his chair and rubbed his wrists.

  “Well, as you know, we played pool. Once or twice a week. But . . . in fact we played for money, and I often won. I’m not good at many things, but I’m not too bad at pool. One time when I won a lot of money, Steph accused me of cheating. Nonsense! How can you cheat at pool?”

  “You said ‘a lot of money.’ How much?”

  “Thirty-two hundred euros. For me that’s a lot—more than two months’ salary. That was last summer, and since then, Steph no longer spoke to me, and neither did Didier. Didier always followed . . . At first I didn’t understand that Steph was really mad at me, I thought he’d get over it. It was when he started waging war on me at work that I realized.”

  “And so he ended up getting you fired.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you had every reason to be mad at them.”

  “Yes, that’s true. And . . .”

  Ménard held his breath. He sensed a confession coming. He watched Sebag, who didn’t budge.

  “One evening I went to Pollestres. Steph always left his car outside. I punctured two of his tires.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Ménard said, annoyed.

  “Not at all, I swear!”

  As he said that, Barrache had glanced behind him in the direction of the stairway.

  “If I’d had the idea of spying on their women, maybe I would have done that and I would have snitched on them, I don’t know . . . but I didn’t have that idea.”

  “Are you sorry about that?” Sebag asked.

  “Yes and no.”

  Barrache even gave a half-smile.

  “It was a pretty good idea, I think, although a little devious all the same. I don’t think the guy who did that thought it would go so far. That’s what I mean when I say that I’m not sorry. I didn’t want Didier to die and still less Madame Abad . . .”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “What about Sandrine Valls?”

  “I didn’t know her, either.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

  Ménard shot Sebag a dark look. His colleague was stealing the show, as usual, by pretending to be sympathetic.

  “You believe me? You think it was somebody else?”

  “I don’t believe anything, I’m searching. You are aware that you’re our only connection between these two cases?”

  The guard tilted his head to one side.

  “Then continue to investigate because I don’t know who could have done this, but I’m sure of one thing: it wasn’t me. I swear it to you.”

  Sitting in the backseat next to Barrache, Ménard didn’t say a word. Sebag didn’t dare turn around, he knew he had annoyed him. He was sorry about that. But . . . on reflection, he didn’t give a tinker’s damn.

  His mobile phone rang. Elsa Moulin. She had probably finished examining Barrache’s computer and was coming to report. And he was the one she called. It was enough to completely exasperate François. He turned on the speaker. Molina, who was driving, tilted his head to the right to hear better.

  “I didn’t find anything that might interest you, anything that seems connected in any way with your investigation. Not even among the recently deleted documents.”

  “Does that mean that there isn’t anything or that you didn’t necessarily succeed in restoring everything?”

  “I found no trace of any particular procedure of erasure. Like everyone else, your suspect puts documents he no longer wants in the trash, and empties it from time to time. And there was no major erasure over the past few days.”

  Sebag turned to the guard. He did not seem particularly relieved.

  “But you have something else to tell me, don’t you, Elsa?”

  The three seconds of silence that followed concealed a smile.

  “It’s impossible to hide anything from you.”

  Barrache’s face fell. He was more than embarrassed, he was devastated.

  “May I speak freely?” Elsa asked.

  “Around me are François, Jacques, and the main person concerned.”

  “Ah . . . I’m not sure . . .”

  Ménard sat straight up on his seat and gripped the back of Gilles’s seat.

  “Go on, go ahead, we’re listening.”

  “Well, if you insist . . . I found, obviously, all kinds of photos, hundreds, even thousands of them, maybe, mainly pictures of landscapes, flowers, and animals . . . but not only that.”

  “Pictures of his children as well?” Ménard suggested.

  “Of course, but not only! I understand why Monsieur Barrache really didn’t want us to inspect this computer.”

  “This is getting interesting,” Molina remarked with amusement. “Tell us more.”

  “I prefer to let you guess.”

  Sebag knew that the question was addressed particularly to him.

  “Is that a challenge?”

  “Affirmative. If I lose, I’ll take you out to lunch.”

  “How much time do I have?”

  “Thirty seconds, is that enough?”

  “OK.”

  Barrache buried his face in his hands, which Ménard had cuffed again. He was trembling. The first idea that came to Sebag’s mind was that the guard was a closet pedophile, but he rejected that idea immediately: that was a crime. Elsa wouldn’t have made a game out of that.

  Sebag thought. Contemplated the guard’s sparse head of hair. Remembered the atmosphere of sadness and loneliness that reigned in his home. The children’s room: an almost-empty armoire, two beds carefully made, hoping for a miracle, posters of singers on the walls, with their smiles frozen for “poster-ity.” Or for “posternity.” He closed his eyes. Saw the guard again standing in the main room: his calm air of a docile sheep, his unevenly shaven, vague beard, his belly-buoy and his short, skinny legs.

  The difficulties Gilles was going through made him indifferent to certain things, and ultrasensitive to others. He was a sponge, an enormous sponge, absorbing everything around him. And what he grasped of this invisible world passed through his brain even less than before: it was in his flesh that he felt the pain of tragedies.

  Not very focused on his investigations, he was missing—and he sensed this—elementary facts. But when he needed his intuition to play a game, it answered the call. In spite of himself.

  He was going to find the answer. He perceived a quivering that he knew very well.

  Elsa’s tone and concern, Barrache’s palpable embarrassment . . . There was hardly any doubt. She had found porn photos or even videos on the computer. He mentally reviewed what he knew about the options offered on certain sites, set aside the lesbians (too classical), hesitated an instant regarding big black men with mammoth dicks (too depressing), and ended up making his choice. By crossing what he believed might be Barrache’s taste with what was likely to make Elsa smile, he thought he’d found the solution.

  He looked at Barrache’s resigned silhouette and felt an immense compassion for this loser, an abandoned father and an illiterate guard. Whether or not he was the author of the anonymous letters, he didn’t deserve to be humiliated this way.

  “Sorry, I’ve lost.”

  And he hung up.

  CHAPTER 34

  Superintendent Castello was examining the arabesques drawn by Dominique Barrache under Ménard’s dictation. A “t” without a right angle or verticality, a “z” as rounded as the “s,” “o”s that looked less like a soccer ball than a rugby ball, and moreover placed crookedly on the turf before a penalty kick.

  “Is he really illiterate?”

  Although the superintendent had addressed him, Sebag let François answer.

  “He claims that he has l
ost the habit of holding a pen and now writes only on his computer.”

  “Mademoiselle Moulin brought me the result of her examination. It’s true that in the texts she found, he makes an enormous number of mistakes. Sometimes it’s hardly even phonetic. Some sentences have to be read aloud to be understood.”

  “We can’t exclude the hypothesis that he’s trying to fool us,” Ménard replied. “The corbeau necessarily spent a long time preparing his act. Even the texts full of errors in his digital documents might have been written to deceive us.”

  Castello frowned.

  “You mean, including the awkward, touching letters he wrote to his wife and children?”

  “I haven’t read them, but why not?”

  Castello put the sheet of paper back in the file folder lying open in front of him.

  “Do we have clear proof against him?”

  “No,” Ménard acknowledged.

  “Concordant evidence?”

  “His new employer had him work several nights in a row in the building of the Dames de France, on the Place de Catalogne. That’s downtown, not far from the area where the corbeau made most of his phone calls.”

  “Not very far . . .” the superintendent repeated. “That’s not much. We may have arrested him too quickly.”

  “I was hoping to make him crack.”

  “It’s easier to make a suspect confess when you have solid charges to bring against him.”

  “Abad received photos to inform him of his wife’s infidelity, and maybe also phone calls; as for Valls, he received anonymous text messages and maybe photos. That can’t be a coincidence, and Barrache is our only point in common between the two men. He has a mobile phone and moreover he’s a good photographer.”

  “And on the psychological level, is he a good suspect?”

  Castello had deliberately turned away from Ménard to address this question to Sebag.

  “We can’t exclude the possibility that he’s an excellent actor,” Gilles said prudently.

  “In short, you don’t ‘feel’ that he’s guilty?”

  Sebag gave a sideways glance at François before answering.

  “I have trouble seeing him in this role, he’s more of a good guy. And if he was the corbeau, he’d be racked by remorse.”

  “That could be just a defense mechanism,” Ménard suggested. “He refuses to see himself as guilty, and therefore plays the innocent perfectly.”

  Castello jerked his chin toward Sebag to ask his opinion.

  “Everything is possible . . .”

  “But we agree that it can’t be a coincidence?” Castello insisted. “And that there is only one corbeau?”

  Sebag silently acquiesced. Ménard seized the opportunity.

  “And that corbeau is Barrache. He’s our only suspect, and so it must be him!”

  The superintendent let a few seconds pass before concluding:

  “Indicting someone because we don’t have another possible perpetrator is one of the primary causes of judicial errors. You still have twenty-four hours to find me something solid against this guard. Afterward we’ll be obliged to let him go. I can’t imagine transferring him to the prosecutor with so little evidence.”

  “Bring him to me here right now and I’ll make him talk.”

  Molina was pacing up and down in the office like a caged animal. He had eaten only a sandwich and was starving to death. Impatient to have it out.

  “On the condition, of course, that this Barrache has something to confess.”

  “To question him again, it would be better for you to be calmer,” François Ménard advised. “This morning, you were pushing the borderline.”

  “I played my role.”

  “Yes, but it was borderline all the same.”

  The two policemen looked at Sebag. He agreed:

  “The second slap was borderline.”

  “OK, if you’re all against me, you can just play the bad cop next time.”

  He smiled. He had an idea.

  “I’m going to develop a new technique for making suspects talk.”

  He waited for his colleagues to give in to curiosity. Ménard remained impassive, but Sebag played along and asked him to say more.

  “The next time, I’m going to eat a plate of aioli before I question someone. Blowing breath loaded with garlic into a suspect’s nose is still not considered an act of torture by the European Court, and yet, in comparison to that, cattle prods and waterboarding are like a spring breeze compared to the tramontane.”

  He roared with laughter and his colleagues were kind enough to echo him. At that moment Elsa Moulin walked into the office.

  “I see that you’re having lots of fun in here.”

  She embraced the three men.

  “You owe me a meal,” she told Sebag.

  “Not sure about that . . .”

  She wrinkled her forehead.

  “I don’t understand! You said yourself that you’d lost.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt Barrache by revealing all that right in front of him.”

  The young woman looked at the file folder she’d given Castello and which now lay on Sebag’s desk.

  “It’s easy, now . . .”

  “We haven’t opened it yet.”

  Molina and Ménard confirmed what he’d said.

  “OK, the game continues, then.”

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, Sebag found himself in the position of the divine wizard. He looked straight into Elsa’s eyes and reviewed the hypotheses he had rejected the day before. The same tonalities rang in his head. And rang right.

  “I think Barrache is a lover of photos of ‘mature’ women, as they’re called.”

  He looked for a more precise answer on his colleague’s face. He found it.

  “Older women with big breasts.”

  Elsa remained speechless. Molina opened the file, took some photos, and swore.

  “Ah, damn, the asshole!”

  Sebag smiled. If someday he were to leave the police, maybe he could have a career on the stage. Although . . . There were events in his life that it had taken him a long time to discover.

  “Decidedly, you’ll always astonish me,” Elsa said. “So I’m the one who owes you a meal.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not. I’d have had lunch with you anyway. In either case, I won.”

  This little game with Elsa, this pleasant flirting, flattered Sebag. It restored his confidence in himself. His confidence in life.

  “You’re too cute.”

  “Not enough yet, I’m afraid.”

  Jacques laid the photos on the desk one by one.

  “Well, human nature is curious all the same,” he said philosophically. “A guy can write sweet words to his wife and then console himself by beating off to photos of sixty-year-old women giving blow jobs.”

  After a short pause he added, very prosaically:

  “I hope, Elsa, that you put gloves on to examine this computer, because between tears, snot, and sperm, Barrache’s keyboard must be one helluva nest of germs. Just imagine the orgy of bacteria between the keys. You could pick up the clap just surfing on Google.”

  Two hours later, Molina was racing down the stairway, crossing the headquarters’ lobby, and bursting out the door. He finally found Gilles smoking a cigarette in the parking lot.

  “Come on, let’s go! There’s an emergency.”

  Molina opened the door of his car and sat down at the wheel. With exasperating slowness, Gilles crushed out his cigarette and got in alongside his partner.

  “Hurry up! There’s a nut handing out mail in the street and threatening passersby. There’s going to be a ruckus!”

  “He’s handing out mail? Flyers, you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Ripoll had sever
al phone calls at the switchboard. He told me it was mail.”

  Sebag opened the glove box and found a pair of handcuffs that he slipped into one of his pockets. He put the revolving light on the roof of the car while Molina turned on the siren and headed into the traffic.

  “At last report, he was at the foot of the Castillet.”

  Less than a minute later, they arrived in front of the ancient city gate. There was a crowd on the square. People were talking and gesturing. Gilles got out of the car. A lady holding a crying baby in her arms spoke to him:

  “He went that way, down Boulevard Clémenceau. Look, he gave me this. He’s really not OK, he scared the baby!”

  Sebag got back in the car and looked at the paper he’d been given. It was a message sent by a certain Marie-Isabelle Casty to a certain Alain Guibert. It read: “I need to feel your hands on my body, I desire you, I love you.”

  “Ah, OK. So it’s about sex again . . .” Molina said.

  “We can assume that it’s not the Marie-Isabelle in question who’s distributing these messages, and if you want my opinion, it’s not the Guibert in question, either. There’s another character involved here.”

  “In love, uneven numbers are always a problem. In short, it’s another . . . another cuckold who’s going through a crisis! Clearly, there’s an epidemic. At this rate, we’re going to be able establish a specialized brigade.”

  He’d hesitated to use the word “cuckold,” because he feared that that word could hurt Gilles. But since he wasn’t supposed to know, he’d decided to act “as if.”

  On Boulevard Clémenceau, they spotted stunned passersby looking backward with concern. They had only to follow the stream to find a giant in a tank top handing out flyers to anyone who was willing to take them. He was taking them out of a big rigid plastic bag of the kind found in shopping centers.

  “I know this guy,” Sebag said.

  “A pal of yours?”

  “Not really. Well . . . I don’t think so. I’ve seen him before, that’s all. But I don’t remember when or where.”

  Molina slammed on the brakes as they came up to the man, who stopped and pivoted toward their unmarked car. His blond hair flew around his bull-like shoulders.