The Awkward Squad

by Sophie Hénaff

  “About Torrez . . . he’s got his own office, right?”

  Capestan nodded her confirmation and looked over at Lebreton.

  “There has to be one case worth investigating,” he said, allowing the briefest glimpse at his intentions before diving back into the cardboard box. “I’m looking for it.”

  And so there would be four of them. Not quite the twenty she had had in mind, but it was a start. All things considered, Capestan was pretty pleased.

  4

  The following day, they spent hours digging. Randomly picking at the wall of boxes lining the corridor, they skimmed through files in the hope of unearthing something worthy of further investigation. Rosière was the first to vent her frustration.

  “Are we seriously going to riffle through all these cell phone thefts until we’re blue in the face, commissaire?”

  “There’s every chance, capitaine. We haven’t been sent here to hunt down a serial killer. Let’s press on for the moment—you never know what might come up.”

  Positioned against the wall, Rosière looked unconvinced.

  “Fine, let’s keep playing grab bag,” she said. “In fact, fuck it, I’m going shopping.”

  Capestan watched as she seized her coat with an expansive, theatrical gesture. Generally speaking, Rosière was not an inconspicuous woman: she had fiery red hair, red lipstick, and a shimmering blue coat. Capestan doubted there was a single shade of beige or gray in this eye-catching capitaine’s wardrobe.

  “Hold on,” Lebreton muttered.

  He had just opened a file on his desk. Capestan and Rosière went over to join him.

  “A murder. It was at the top of this one,” he said, indicating a box stamped ORFÈVRES. “The case dates back to 1993 and concerns one Yann Guénan. Shot dead. He was fished out of the Seine by the river police. His body got caught in a propeller.”

  The three officers considered this treasure haul, a faint smile playing over each of their lips. They let a few seconds go by in respectful silence.

  “Do you want to take care of this?” Capestan asked Lebreton. Finders, keepers, after all.

  “Gladly.”

  Time to see whether Sir Lebreton of Internal Affairs was as efficient at wading through the Seine and its floating bodies as he had been at the IGS Capestan had already worked out teams should an investigation come up: she did not want Lebreton, and no one wanted Torrez.

  “Capitaine, you partner up with him,” she said to Rosière.

  “Perfect,” she replied, rubbing her chubby hands with their multicolored rings. “So, what’s this stiff trying to tell us?”

  5

  “Go on, marry me.”

  Despite his efforts to keep his voice down and stay discreet, Gabriel could not stop his words ringing around the Pontoise swimming pool. His proposal traveled across the water and bounced off the indigo tiles before echoing back, eagerly awaiting Manon’s response.

  It was the middle of the afternoon and the pool was all but empty, with the exception of a few determined regulars doing lengths. So long as Gabriel and Manon stayed out of their lanes, nobody minded their noisy chatter and splashing. Manon was swimming with an immaculate breaststroke, managing to maintain her rhythm despite Gabriel’s spluttering attempts to keep up with her. She was smiling through the water running down her face.

  “We’re so young, Gab—”

  Gabriel aimed for the start of each sentence to coincide with Manon coming up for air.

  “It’s not like we’re minors,” he said.

  “Only just.”

  “Do you want me to prove I’m an adult?” he said, still delighting in his achievements of the day before.

  He was lagging a bit and had to kick hard to catch up the two yards that Manon had gained on him.

  “If you don’t want a marriage, we could have a wedding instead? Or a civil partnership? A blood ritual! We could cut our hands with a rusty knife and shake on it?”

  “You’re not going to drop this, are you? This is already the thirtieth time we’ve spoken . . .”

  They overtook an elderly woman in a floral rubber swim cap. She was too focused on her target to give them so much as a sideways glance. Gabriel had a target, too, and he had no intention of missing it.

  “I could get down on one knee, you know. Even in the deep end. I’ll get down on one knee even if it means drinking the whole damn pool. Look, have your big spectacle if that’s what you want. Do you want a ring in a cake? Strawberries dipped in champagne?”

  “Stop it, you’ll make me drown, you lunatic.”

  Manon was gorgeous, and even soaked in gallons of chlorine she smelled wonderful. Gabriel was crazy about her. He was fooling around, splashing her with water as though they were bashful sweethearts from an American romcom. But in reality, every atom of his body was yearning for her answer: there was no joking about that. She had to marry him. She had to stay with him. She could never leave or run away or disappear from sight. He needed her by his side forever. If a piece of paper had the power to make that happen, even the tiniest amount, then he wanted to sign it.

  “Please, Manon. I love you. And I plan to carry on loving you for the next fifty years,” he said.

  “But we’ve got so much time . . .”

  He flicked his hair like a dog shaking itself down, his red-brown locks sticking to his forehead.

  “Exactly, fifty years. Starting whenever you want.”

  She put her hand on the edge of the pool to catch her breath and look at him for a second. He stared into her eyes, so familiar with their every nuance, and he knew she was going to say yes. He prepared all his senses and engaged his memory, determined to save this moment. He had forgotten so many of the crucial points in his life—disappeared without any hope of retrieval—that he had etched this one into the innermost part of his brain.

  “All right. Let’s do it,” she said, taking her time before adding, “Yes.”

  Gabriel went home with a real spring in his step. He was going to tell his father the news. But on boulevard Beaumarchais, a few yards from his house, he started to feel a lead weight in his stomach. And the closer he got, the heavier it became. It was a nuisance, a hiccup, a piece of gravel in his shoe: it would go away. He was not sure what it was doing there in the first place, but it would go away.

  It grew from the size of a marble to a pétanque ball. Outside, he gave a short ring on the doorbell before letting himself in. He saw his father, sitting comfortably in his Voltaire armchair, turn his head and stand up to greet him. Tall, strong, solemn. He was like a cathedral, Gabriel’s father. He took off his glasses and asked his son how his day had been, as he did every evening.

  Gabriel launched in without any preliminaries:

  “Dad, Manon has agreed to marry me!”

  He seemed as though he was about to smile, but he did not really react. Gabriel thought he was a little shocked, caught off guard. Inevitably his father would think he was too young, that he wasn’t ready yet.

  “We were hoping to do it this spring, if possible. I’ll be needing the family record book.”

  His father seemed suddenly to tense up, letting out the slightest of shudders. Gabriel saw a shadow fall over his eyes and stay there.

  6

  As she stepped inside what she was now calling, with justice, her commissariat, Capestan bumped into a bald man in a blue suit who must have measured a cubic yard. He had missed a patch shaving his chin, and his tie was stained with leftovers from different days, let alone different meals. On his jacket lapel was a Lions Club badge that he was trying to pass off as a Légion d’Honneur. Plastic cup in hand, he bowed his head courteously.

  “Capitaine Merlot, at your service. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”

  A powerful, toxic waft of red wine filled the air, forcing Capestan to hold her breath as she tried to answer.

  “Commissaire Capestan. Good morning, capitaine.”

  “Delighted, dear friend,” he went on lustily, not allowing the announce
ment of her rank to put him off balance at all. “Now, I have a meeting from which I am unable to extricate myself. I mustn’t dally, but I do hope to have the honor of soon making your acquaintance more fully, since . . .”

  Merlot spent a few more minutes pontificating on the importance of his meeting and the value of his associates before placing his empty cup on a pile of boxes by the doorway and promising to come back the moment his schedule permitted. Capestan nodded her consent, as though this à la carte approach to the job went without saying, then entered the apartment and quickly opened a window. She consulted her memory bank and brought up Merlot’s CV: Capitaine. A “deskbound grandpa,” as the nickname goes for those aging patrol policemen assigned to drafting reports. After thirty years doing vice with the brigade mondaine, he had been demoted to the bench. A notorious boozer and incorrigible chatterbox, he spent most of his time idling, though he was an undeniably gifted people person. Capestan hoped he would come back to swell the ranks once his fabled meeting was over and once he had popped a few aspirins. In the meantime, she already had enough of a job motivating her team of four—and her biggest job of all would be to persuade Torrez to work in tandem with her.

  The day before, in a box sent over from the brigade criminelle, Capestan had found an interesting file lurking between a suicide and a road accident: an elderly woman strangled during a burglary. The perpetrator had never been found. The case dated back to 2005, and it warranted a fresh look.

  Before going home, Capestan had dropped a copy of the file on Torrez’s desk to start the ball rolling. If, as promised, he had arrived at 8:00 a.m. and barricaded himself in at his end of the corridor, then he ought to have made a start on it. Not that any of this was a given.

  Capestan said a brief hello to Lebreton, who was wrestling with a tangle of electrical cables in an attempt to connect his computer to the internet. She dropped her handbag and coat on a chair next to her desk and automatically moved her hand to her belt to take her Smith & Wesson Bodyguard out of its holster. This lightweight, compact five-round semiautomatic pistol fired special .38-caliber shells: a present from Buron to celebrate her arrival in his team back when he was head of the antigang squad. But the revolver was not there. Capestan was no longer permitted to carry a weapon. She saved face by pretending to tighten her belt, then switched on her desk lamp.

  The commissaire went to the kitchen to deposit the big red shopping bag she had arrived with. She took out an electric filter coffee machine, a box of six cups with various saucers, four mugs, some glasses, spoons, three packages of ground coffee, some sugar, dishwashing soap, a sponge, and a “Cheeses of France” dish towel. Reluctantly, she offered Lebreton a coffee, which he declined. She told herself not to bother next time.

  Mug in hand, she sat down at her desk to study the murder of Marie Sauzelle, seventy-six, killed in June 2005 at her house on 30, rue Marceau in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Capestan opened the file. The first photograph was all it took to cut her off from the world.

  The elderly lady was sitting on her sofa with an almost dignified air. She was blue. Red marks flecked her eyes and cheekbones, the tip of her tongue was sticking out from her lips, and an air of panic was still noticeable on her bloated face. But her hair was neatly done, held back by a tortoiseshell headband, and her hands were resting serenely one on top of the other.

  All around the neatly arranged victim, the living room was a bomb site. Ornaments had been sent tumbling from the shelves, and the ground was littered with the debris of shattered porcelain animals. In the foreground of the photograph were the splintered remains of a pink poodle barometer promising fair weather. A bouquet of wooden tulips was strewn across the carpet. On the coffee table, another bouquet, of fresh flowers this time, mocked them from its vase, which had somehow been spared.

  The next photograph revealed a different corner of the same room. CDs and all sorts of books were lying in a heap at the bottom of an oak bookcase. Opposite the sofa, the television—an ancient CRT model with a rounded screen—was showing the nature channel. One detail intrigued Capestan, who rummaged in her bag to find her fold-up magnifying glass. She pulled it out of its case and placed the polished-steel frame over the screen. In the bottom right-hand corner you could make out a symbol: a speaker with a line through it. The TV was on “mute.”

  Capestan pushed the magnifying glass to one side and spread the various photographs over her desk to get a complete picture. Only the living room and the main bedroom had been turned over. The bathroom, the kitchen, and the guest room were unscathed. The commissaire quickly flicked through the reports: the lock on the front door had been forced. Capestan took a sip of coffee and thought for a moment.

  A burglary. If the TV is on “mute,” then Marie Sauzelle must have been watching it. You do not go to bed and leave your TV set on. She hears a noise and cuts the sound to make sure. The hallway was visible from the living room, so she must have given the burglar a shock. But instead of running away like a normal burglar, he decides to kill her. Then he sits her back down and, judging by her tidy appearance and the headband, he restyles her hair. After that, he trashes the living room, looking for money no doubt, followed by the bedroom, where the jewels had gone missing.

  Capestan rotated the magnifying glass in her hands. This burglar struck her as somewhat unstable and irrational. Nervous, at the very least. Maybe a druggie, or a first-timer, something that always complicates investigations.

  Next she tackled the coroner’s report and the summary of evidence from the scene. Marie Sauzelle was strangled to death. Her body had been discovered much later, probably ten days after she was killed. The coroner had been unable to specify the time or day of her death. He noted the presence of a bruise on her right forearm, presumably the result of defensive action, but had not discovered any trace of skin residue beneath her fingernails.

  As for the forensics team, they had not managed to find any DNA or fingerprints at the scene other than those belonging to the victim or her cleaning lady, who had been vacation in Le Lavandou (in the rain) at the time of the murder. “Some folk just have no luck,” she had said, referring to the weather, not the murder.

  Even though they had quickly come to the conclusion that this was a burglary gone wrong, the team from the brigade criminelle did explore other scenarios. The victim’s telephone records did not turn up anything remarkable: fairly short calls from family members, administrative numbers, a few friends. Nothing suspicious in terms of bank transfers either, even though her current account had plenty in it.

  The testimony of one of Marie Sauzelle’s friends highlighted the extent of her community involvement, as well as her passion for tango: “She came along with me to a session a year ago and it completely changed her life. Marie took several hours of lessons a week, and every Thursday we’d go down to the tea dance at Balajo together. She’d always wear incredible outfits: split skirts and low-cut leotards. Despite her age, she still had it . . . Yup, she was talented, and she was so cheerful, too. Even when she was dancing, she couldn’t stop herself humming along: tam tam tadam, tadadadam, tam tam tam tadam . . . It irritated her partners a bit, it must be said.” Capestan grinned at the thought of the slick-haired grandpas grimacing as Marie threw them off their steps.

  It was her neighbor, Serge Naulin, fifty-six years of age, who alerted the authorities. The victim’s brother, André Sauzelle, sixty-eight, living in Marsac in Creuse, about four hours south of Paris, became worried that she was not answering his calls and asked Naulin to check if everything was all right. He had rung her bell without any success and, since “a nauseating smell seemed to be coming from inside,” he called the fire department, who notified the police.

  The transcript from the brother’s interview ran to only two pages, but an appendix to the file established him as a bad-tempered, rough man with a history of domestic abuse. A perfect fit for a suspect, but he had been cleared: no incriminating evidence, no apparent motive, and a large geographic distance without any bank
activity to indicate he had traveled. So the officers from the brigade criminelle turned their focus back to burglars operating at the time, and nothing had come up.

  They needed to go back to square one: visit the crime scene and question the neighbors. It was seven years later, but maybe someone would remember something. A murder next door is not something you wipe from your memory.

  As she stood up to go and find Torrez, Capestan noticed a head bobbing uncertainly in the doorway. It belonged to a lanky young man with thinning blond hair. He glanced up from the entrance, waved his hand, then disappeared abruptly. The commissaire recognized him as Lewitz, a transfer from the Nanterre branch of the police judiciaire, where the overzealous brigadier had written off three cars in three months. Along with Merlot’s visit, he was the second person to vanish as quickly as he had appeared, and it was not even midday. It gave her confidence that her squad might swell in number after all, even if it was by one anticlimax at a time. Now they were seven.

  Lebreton was making notes in Yann Guénan’s file, waiting for Rosière to grace them with her fulsome presence. As he turned each page, he would tap his pen on his desk, like a drummer. At no point, however, did he betray a hint of nervousness. Never. Before joining the IGS, he had spent ten years as a negotiator with an armed response team at RAID. He was not easily flustered. The guy was the epitome of composure, with a dash of arrogance thrown in for good measure. He ignored Capestan as she passed him.

  Through the door, the commissaire could make out the soft croon of Daniel Guichard’s “Mon Vieux.” Her knock was met with a good three seconds of silence, after which a “Yes” rang out, which Capestan interpreted as: “Who the hell is disturbing me and why?” She opened the door, determined to seem unfazed about disturbing him and show that she was in charge. Torrez was stretched out on a brown velvet sofa that had not been there the day before. Capestan wondered how on earth he had managed to get it up there. A mystery. Tacked to the wall was a child’s drawing of a sun and a dog, or a cat, or possibly even a horse. A glance at the file on the lieutenant’s knees suggested he was coming to the end of his read-through.