“I’ve hurt him enough, I’m not going to betray him!”
He nodded.
“So you know. So it’s here.”
She looked down at her glass.
“I understand you, Annie, I understand. But I’m going to find it. Without you, in spite of you.”
He searched the garage again. For a long time. Then the girls’ room, then the parents’ room. Without the slightest success. He went back to Annie, who was in front of the TV in the living room. She’d taken the bottle of plum brandy with her and its level had gone down significantly. He remembered that he hadn’t finished his glass.
He went back into the kitchen, emptied his brandy, and then poured himself a glass of water from the faucet. The green salad bowl that had held the peelings and the tea bags was drying on the drying rack. Annie had probably washed it after emptying its contents on the compost pile.
He suddenly recalled the woman’s hesitation, her embarrassment.
In the cabinet under the sink, he found the garbage can, and examined it. The peelings were there along with the tea bags, on top of a pile of detritus in plastic. Annie hadn’t gone out to throw all that away in the garden as she usually did. He opened the kitchen door and walked over to the shed. Without hesitating, he thrust his hands into the compost. He pulled out the heavy plastic bag. He quickly wiped it off.
By the light of the neighbors’ window, he could distinguish the rectangular form of a laptop computer.
CHAPTER 49
Gilles Sebag led Olivier Carbonnell into the interrogation room. Leaning over the table, Julie and Molina concealed the evidence. When Gilles gave them the signal, they moved away, and Carbonnell shrank back when he saw his laptop as well as a camera and a telephone. Gilles had discovered the camera by continuing to dig around in the compost; he located the telephone that same day in a locker at the gym. Carbonnell had undoubtedly put it there as a precaution, to frustrate any possible geolocation.
Gilles gently put his hand on the suspect’s back and made him sit down.
“I think we have things to say to one another.”
Carbonnell‘s shoulders sagged.
“I spoke with your wife yesterday, Olivier. She has seen the albums, the photos on your laptop, she knows everything. She tried to deny it right to the end. To defend you.“
Carbonnell stared at him. His eyes were empty. Was he seeing anything? Gilles didn’t try to rush the confessions. They would come when he was ready. Julie, who had gone out, returned to the room with a coffeepot and a sack of pastries. Jacques set glasses on the table and they ate in silence like old friends. Carbonnell chewed slowly. The muscles in his jaws bulged under his greasy skin.
Once they’d eaten enough, Sebag brushed away the feast’s crumbs.
“It was no accident that you discovered that Madame Martinez was cheating on her husband, was it?”
He’d decided to leave personal questions aside for the time being. Carbonnell raised an interested eyebrow before assenting with a movement of his square jaw.
“And you’d immediately told your colleague about it without thinking?”
That was the hypothesis that Sebag had formulated to Julie before talking with the special agent. Carbonnell assented again. Thus Sebag had guessed right, but it wasn’t his pride that needed to be stroked.
“That was your only mistake.”
He put his hand on the laptop.
“I took a quick look at it this morning. I’m impressed by the amount of information you were able to collect without ever being noticed by your colleagues. You must have a fabulous memory.”
Carbonnell’s lips trembled at the edges.
“I can’t complain about it. It was the only positive thing that my teachers said to me during the whole time I was in school.”
The first words were out, the rest would be easier. Carbonnell had kept too many things bottled up inside him these last months. And with the evidence against him spread out on the table, he no longer had any reason to keep silent.
“Did the idea come to you after you’d told Martinez about his wife’s infidelity?”
20/15 nodded.
“Laurent’s wife didn’t love him anymore, but she couldn’t make up her mind to break up their family. I did him a favor, in fact. When I realized, I was furious and I decided to put things right. To see to it that the unfaithful people were the primary victims.”
He’d said “people” rather than “women.” There would be time later on to have him dot the “i”s.
“It must have been an enormous task,” Gilles limited himself to saying.
“I spent a huge amount of time on it, that’s for sure.”
This time, the corners of his mouth actually rose.
“I began by discreetly aiming my cameras toward certain hotels. I was looking for hotels of moderate standing, neither too expensive nor too tawdry. I was always willing to volunteer to keep watching the screens over the lunch break. It was rush hour for that kind of . . . leisure activity, and at work I was more at peace. I spied on the public parks and parking lots: when the lovers separated in front of their cars, there were often mad kisses.”
His voice had faded toward the end. Carbonnell looked at his empty cup. Sebag took the coffeemaker and filled it, along with the three others.
“I spotted couples and I followed people. Not only with the cameras. Once I’d noticed a few regular rendezvous, I used my days off to complete my work. I stood in front of hotels and then followed the lovers.”
On the computer, Sebag had discovered dozens of named files. A hundred and twenty-three of them. They included not only family names, but also addresses, occupations, and the telephone numbers of the wives, the lovers, and the husbands. Carbonnell also wrote down license plate numbers. Thanks to them and his position as a municipal policeman, he must have had access to a certain amount of valuable data.
“Is that how you came across Christine Abad and Éric Balland?”
“Among others . . .”
“How about Sandrine Valls?”
Sebag had asked this question carelessly, though it had been bothering him. By what extraordinary chance had Carbonnell also been led to follow the wife of a colleague of Stéphane Abad’s and thus to trigger almost simultaneous tragedies involving these two employees at Cantalou? A coincidence that had long sent their investigation down the wrong path . . .
“I informed myself concerning other husbands and learned that Abad frequented a downtown bar and that he was friends with a certain Didier Valls. I decided to follow this guy . . .”
“Why?”
“Just like that, on a whim . . . I had gradually begun surfing videos and the Net, moving from one individual to another without any motive other than the impulse of the moment. It was as good a move as any, and here’s the proof! From Didier Valls I moved to his wife Sandrine, and then I managed to find her lover.”
“An incredible stroke of luck all the same,” Molina remarked.
Carbonnell turned to him.
“You could say that . . . In that domain, unfortunately, when you seek, you find.”
Julie, annoyed, spoke up:
“Sandrine Valls had a friend, not a lover. She’d never cheated on her husband.”
Carbonnell raised his right eyebrow and spoke to Gilles:
“Is that what she claimed?”
“Isn’t it true?”
20/15 chortled.
“Then you have to explain what they were doing together on certain late afternoons when she followed him to his apartment on the Quai de Hanovre . . .”
So the “virtuous” Sandrine, contrary to her repeated denials, had crossed the Rubicon long before her husband’s suicide.
“What a damned liar and diabolical hypocrite!” Sebag fulminated.
“Nonetheless, with Valls you made a blunde
r,” Julie insisted. “You hadn’t foreseen that he would jump out the window.”
Carbonnell shrugged his hefty shoulders.
“That’s true. But that’s how it is. It was his choice. I was only the messenger.”
After his initial admissions, Olivier Carbonnell was now unveiling his line of defense.
“Do you know the song? ‘The first one who tells the truth has to be executed.’ When journalists reveal politicians’ turpitudes, some people attack them rather than the corrupt officials. They say the journalists were manipulated. Even the judicial system sometimes prosecutes them: they call it ‘violating judicial confidentiality.’”
“Cheating on your spouse is no longer a crime!”
Julie wouldn’t give up.
“And that’s undoubtedly a mistake made by our society. These people have betrayed their spouses, their families, they’ve lied to them. I’ve revealed their offense, and it’s up to their husbands to judge them.”
Gilles noticed that Carbonnell had said “husbands” rather than “spouses,” but didn’t have time to point that out. Julie was pursuing her attack:
“To judge them and sentence them?”
“Most of them just get divorced.”
“But that doesn’t satisfy you. You want them to beat their wives, to kill them.”
“I’m only the messenger, I don’t have blood on my hands, Mademoiselle.”
“Call me Lieutenant, please!”
Carbonnell shot her a black look. He didn’t like being put in his place by a young woman cop. Sebag decided to shift to the topic of responsibility.
“You chose your interlocutors, didn’t you? Stéphane Abad had the ideal profile for you: he went to the shooting gallery, he had a weapon at home. Jean-Paul Casty was a good candidate: a violent man, a brute who beat his wife. And Bastien Gali? Out of work, depressed, he was going to do something stupid, and you knew it . . .”
Carbonnell nervously massaged the palm of one hand with the other.
“I contacted lots of people, and as I just told you, most of the couples simply separated.”
“In the majority of the cases, you limited yourself to sending photos, but with the men I’ve mentioned—and with a few others, I suppose—you had a special contact: you telephoned them.”
“I chose those who seemed to me most likely to keep quiet about me. With the others, I took no risks.”
“Those you harassed, you wanted to push them to their limits. Because you’d chosen them especially for their inclination toward violence, isn’t that right? Go on, dare to tell me the contrary.”
Carbonnell stopped massaging his hand and furiously crossed his fingers. The joints immediately whitened. He bowed his head.
“I was only the messenger.”
“The messenger for what, for whom? Up to this point, you’ve suggested that you attacked ‘individuals,’ ‘unfaithful people.’ The way you talk, you’d think they had no gender . . . But it was women you had it in for, wasn’t it? That’s obvious for everyone, so why not just say it?”
Charbonnell raised his head and opened two frightened eyes. One would have said that he was only now realizing the ferocity of what he’d done.
“I was only the messenger,” he repeated again. “I didn’t harm anybody.”
Behind the one-way mirror, François Ménard and Superintendent Castello were following the interrogation. The lieutenant kept looking at his boss out of the corner of his eye and was enraged to see him exulting. His protégé was triumphing and conducting the interview very effectively. Ménard had to admit that Sebag had once again unraveled the complicated knot of the plot.
And yet it was he, Ménard, who had put him on the trail . . . He who had discovered the existence of the corbeau. True, he’d taken the wrong path because of that damned guard, but who wouldn’t have fallen into that trap laid by chance? A stroke of bad luck. He had not deserved that, really. He worked diligently, rigorously, and punctually. In this case, he pulled the chestnuts out of the fire and now it was Gilles who was finishing the cooking and would serve them up to the prosecutor on a golden platter . . .
At the beginning of his career, an old inspector had told him that to be a good cop, you had to be lucky. For sure! From that point of view as well, Sebag was one hell of a policeman . . .
“I began last May, when I learned that Martinez’s wife was leaving him. Laurent told other people that he was the one who was leaving, but he couldn’t lie to me.”
After the skirmishing, Sebag had decided to back off and get back to the facts. Carbonnell became talkative.
“When I wasn’t sure that I could remember what I saw on my screens, I took notes on my telephone: I made it look like I was writing text messages.”
He smiled, as if pleased with himself.
“One day Martinez told me that the girls in the office were talking about me because of that: they thought I had a mistress! I didn’t deny it; it suited me.”
He complacently smoothed his delicate mustache with his index finger.
“In the evening, when I got home, I closed myself up in the garage and entered everything into the computer. I completed certain files by making use of the Internet. It’s amazing how some people lack the most elementary prudence. I created false profiles for myself on Facebook—a man and a woman—and made lots of friends. Even if people pay a little attention to what they publish on their pages, they’re less careful in the comments and especially in their ‘likes.’ It’s easy to see special relationships emerging between people.”
Sebag wanted to drink a little coffee, but it was already cold. He pushed his cup away. Molina took the opportunity to speak up:
“What astonishes me is that people have so completely forgotten that there are a hundred and eighty surveillance cameras in this town!”
Carbonnell chortled:
“And do you yourself always think about them?”
“Nevertheless . . .”
“Oh yeah? And when you began to understand that a well-informed man was telling husbands about their wives’ infidelities, did you immediately think that he must be an operator at the Perpignan video surveillance center? Of course you didn’t! And yet you often work with us. Why do you think that after the polemics there have been all over France regarding video surveillance, the government officials who installed it no longer publicize our successes? So people, and especially criminals, will continue to forget about us, that’s why!”
He smoothed his mustache again.
“In fact, do you know who is the only citizen in this town who is constantly aware of the presence of these cameras?”
“No,” Molina said.
“The mayor of Perpignan! He told us that one day when he was showing the center to a group of journalists. He was joking, but I’m sure it’s true: it bothers him that some of his employees can follow everything he does.”
Carbonnell took the time to contemplate the three lieutenants and savor their surprise. Sebag closed the parenthesis Jacques had opened:
“All the same, it’s unbelievable. I can’t get over the fact that you were able to collect so much personal information.”
Carbonnell winked at him. He was ready to go on and on.
“I had an advantage. I have a little secret I haven’t yet told you about.”
Sebag winked back at him.
“What is it?”
“I can read lips.”
“Ah, the scoundrel!” the superintendent exclaimed. “I’m not sure that the CNIL41 foresaw that possibility. An ability like that in a job like this one leads inevitably to a violation of the right to privacy!”
“The journalists are going to have a field day with this one,” Ménard replied.
“We don’t have to tell them about it.”
Castello pinched his nose.
“Although .
. . Why hide it from them? After all, it’s relevant to the debate about video surveillance . . .”
Behind the one-way mirror, Carbonnell was continuing to explain. He’d learned to read lips long before he started spying on people. He’d acquired the skill little by little. A gift he’d cultivated, even during evenings at home in front of the television. To the point that he could now no longer tolerate the dubbing of foreign films.
The superintendent turned to his lieutenant.
“What about you, François? Do you pay attention to the cameras when you’re walking down the street?”
“Absolutely not.”
Julie had had the good idea of bringing them more coffee. “Old habits die hard,” Sebag thought. Why did everyone think it was normal that the only woman in the office play the role of hostess? When the cups had been refilled, Gilles launched into the most personal phase of the interrogation.
“How did you learn that your wife was cheating on you?”
Carbonnell looked down into his coffee cup.
“Through social networks.”
He put his hands around the plastic cup. His gaze was lost in the blackness of the coffee.
“What do you mean by that?” Sebag asked.
20/15 slowly raised his head.
“I noticed that one guy was very present on her page. Too present.”
He put the cup to his lips, blew on the hot liquid. He was less talkative on this painful subject, but Sebag wasn’t worried: the mechanism was running.
“In fact, I think nothing had yet happened between them.”
Carbonnell put down his cup without having drunk from it.
“Maybe if I’d shown my jealousy at that point, none of this would have happened.”
“But you didn’t do anything?”
“No.”
He put two sugar cubes in his coffee and stirred it.
“A few weeks later, I bugged her telephone and discovered everything.”
His voice rose from his gut; it came out muffled and cavernous.
“And you still didn’t do anything . . .” Sebag said.
Crimes of Winter Page 38
