The Awkward Squad

by Sophie Hénaff

  Next to him was his pal Lewitz, the crazy motorhead that the higher-ups had insisted on transferring to Capestan, having failed in their attempts to fire him outright. Brigadier Lewitz loved cars, and half his career in the police force had been spent with the siren blaring. He was a hopeless driver, but he refused to admit it. Cars were his mistresses, Fernando Alonso was his idol, and his hands did not find peace unless they were gripping a steering wheel.

  The state had generously allocated the squad a whiteboard and three marker pens, one of which had not dried up. Torrez had also brought along a blackboard mounted on red metal legs, as well as a box of crayons and a little sponge. His girls had grown out of it, so he was happy it would have a new home. Capestan had used it to recap the Sauzelle case, while the Guénan case was drawn up on the whiteboard. Everything was set for the brainstorming session. Capestan decided to kick off without waiting for Rosière and Lebreton—a warm-up exercise of sorts.

  “Right,” she said in an upbeat voice. “Where are we?”

  There was a brief clinking of glasses and mugs, then everyone’s attention centered on the two boards.

  “At a dead end,” Orsini said to himself.

  “Stuck in the mud,” Évrard added, holding her euro coin tight.

  “In a jam!” Merlot bellowed, delighted with his contribution.

  “In the shit!” Dax and Lewitz screeched, as if they’d just figured out the rules to some game.

  Capestan cut them short.

  “Good, so we’ve grasped the idea of brainstorming, but can we please try to keep it constructive.”

  Not another word after that. To avoid total shutdown, Capestan decided to summarize the state of play. Every lead in both cases had resulted in an impasse. After so many years, the files were like scorched earth. They had taken a closer look at Naulin and André Sauzelle, but nothing new had come up. Capestan surveyed her troops: they looked like wretched bystanders. Defeatism was rife and their enthusiasm was dwindling. If they didn’t manage a breakthrough in either of these inquiries, the squad would be no different from the spent force Buron had envisaged.

  Merlot, always happy to hear the sound of his own voice, took the floor:

  “The motive, children, the motive! We are taking as our point of departure the presumption that Marie Sauzelle is an innocent old lady, but who knows how debauched a life she might have led? What if she had kept a gigolo for company, some tango devotee with a voracious sexual appetite? What if her wanderlust had hurled her into the clutches of drug abuse, placing her at the mercy of Naulin, her dealer? The fundamental question, dear friends, is this—who was Marie Sauzelle? Who was she?”

  Dax nodded in full agreement. The leather of his jacket creaked as he leaned over to Lewitz’s ear.

  “Got any chewing gum?” he whispered loudly.

  Lewitz took a package out of the back pocket of his jeans and offered a piece to Dax, who devoted the remainder of the meeting to mastication.

  “And do we have anything on the boy described by the neighbor?” Orsini asked.

  “No,” Capestan acknowledged.

  Their research into the green helmet had yielded nothing. It was too flimsy a starting point. In any case, Naulin had almost certainly made it up on the spot.

  For the hundredth time, Capestan scanned the blackboard. Burglary, dead bolt, blinds, position of the body, neighbor, cat, flowers, brother, mail . . . She was struggling to work out where the elements of this case ended. Her head felt like a snow globe, her thoughts floating and fluttering in every direction. She had to wait for the flakes to settle before she could see anything clearly.

  The team was now considering Yann Guénan’s board.

  “There’s no point looking into a man taken out by a pro,” Lewitz said to Dax, disrupting the calm atmosphere with a surprisingly lucid point. “Twenty years later, we’re not going to find a thing.”

  “We’re not trying to find anyone, we’re just trying to pass the time,” Dax told him, not seeming in the least concerned by it.

  Orsini nodded in agreement as he picked a bit of lint off his trousers. He was patently of the opinion that, as things currently stood, this case would lead nowhere. As icy as ever, he delivered his verdict:

  “What we need is fresh blood.”

  A shiver ran through the gathering, followed by a few childish snickers before Évrard piped up timidly, her blue eyes wide open:

  “It’s true, we need some new lines of inquiry to flesh out the files. We don’t have anything. We don’t have the resources to carry out an investigation. It’s taking an age to hear back from the archives, not to mention the aborted interrogations . . .”

  The lieutenant still had not come to terms with her Riverni experience.

  “Indeed,” Merlot said, adding his two cents’ worth. “Here it is less ‘cold case’ and more ‘basket case.’ Back when we were in the police proper—”

  “Enough! Enough.”

  Capestan had not raised her voice, but the room still fell silent. This meeting was fast descending into a demotivational session and she needed to put a stop to it. The commissaire looked around the group without focusing on anyone in particular, and for once she addressed them with a blank expression:

  “In war movies, the guy who says ‘We’re all gonna die!’ is never helping anyone. So let’s stop this right now. No more talk of ‘before this, before that.’ Before we landed up here, all of us were done for anyway. All of us. There’s no point going on about the glory days at the Orfèvres—your sentence didn’t start here.”

  Heads dropped and eyes darted around sheepishly. But Capestan did not want the team to dwell on this, so she stood up from the corner of her desk and continued:

  “No more spending 70 percent of your time doing paperwork. No more night rounds or graveyard shifts. No more junkies redecorating the toilets at the station. We’re free to do the job we dreamt of doing when we signed up. We investigate without any pressure, without adhering to protocols or procedures, and without having to file reports. So let’s make the most of it instead of sitting around whining like teenagers who’ve been barred from throwing a party. We’re still part of the police judiciaire, just in our own branch. You don’t get a chance like this twice.”

  Capestan could see that this had lifted their spirits. Shoulders were less droopy. An almost imperceptible ripple ran through the group, a collective movement that seemed to bind together the officers dotted around the room. The team was uniting.

  This budding solidarity was greeted with a sharp yap. Pilou had arrived and seemed to approve of the atmosphere. Rosière and Lebreton followed close behind, leaving their bags at the door and offering a general “hello” as they approached the boards.

  Rosière glanced at Lebreton, who smiled faintly and offered her the role of spokeswoman that she so clearly craved. The capitaine plumped up her hair, stroked her charms, and—sensing that the tension was at breaking point—began her announcement with a stern voice:

  “Yann Guénan, the murdered sailor that Louis-Baptiste and I have been investigating for the last few weeks, knew plenty of people. Including some people who are of interest to us. He compiled a dossier the size of a brick, in which he noted down hundreds of names in his god-awful handwriting. Lebreton, the great commandant you see before you, the most thorough officer that ever lived, got busy and read the whole thing. And then, in the middle of the night, as the ocean swelled outside, one name suddenly jumped out . . .”

  Lebreton raised his eyebrows, urging her to cut her long speech short. Rosière reluctantly came to the point:

  “It was the name of Marie Sauzelle, the old lady strangled in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Our two cases are linked.”

  “What?!?” came the team’s stupefied chorus, after which they sat stock-still, desperate to hear the rest. Rosière lapped up the rapt silence she had managed to provoke from her audience, then continued:

  “She’s on the list of passengers that Yann visited, and one of the ones who
testified. The two of them were in the same boat.”

  Mind-blowing indeed, Capestan thought. The old lady and the sailor had gone to sea together, suffered the trauma of a shipwreck, then met up again afterward. Only to end up murdered. All of a sudden, the threads of this investigation had become interwoven.

  “This changes everything,” the commissaire said, deep in thought.

  “Everything,” Lebreton confirmed.

  28

  Capestan grabbed a piece of paper and, after checking there was nothing important on the back, started using it as a notepad. She had to note down as quickly as possible all the questions that emerged from this revelation. Inevitably her black ballpoint was yet again refusing to work, so—without even bothering to try her luck with the blue—she went for the green. Never any trouble with the greens and reds.

  “Did Sauzelle and Guénan meet on the boat or did they know each other from before and take the trip together? Had André Sauzelle or Naulin ever seen the sailor before? If Marie Sauzelle is linked to the shipwreck, does that let Jallateau off the hook, or does it incriminate him further?”

  Looking up for a second, Capestan realized that all the other officers were scrambling around with their stationery in search of a miracle pen. Only Orsini with his Montblanc and Lebreton with his smartphone were managing to keep up with the commissaire’s quick-fire dictation. Capestan sat up straight.

  “We need a third board.”

  Lewitz obliged, pulling on his jacket and offering to go to the store. The commissaire gave him her wallet and added dry-erase markers and fifty ballpoints to her order. Then she paused for a second and looked at her team. She needed to allocate roles.

  “Capitaine Orsini, can I leave you to dig through the press archives for anything on the shipwreck? Might be worth trying online, but—”

  “No, my guess is it’s too old to have been digitized. I’ll contact my pals instead.”

  “Perfect.”

  Capestan went to the corridor and found Torrez:

  “Can you call André Sauzelle down in Marsac, and Naulin, too? Ask them if the name Guénan means anything to them. The brother never mentioned the shipwreck to us, but that’s to be expected—it was ten years before Marie’s death.”

  Torrez scratched his beard, which sounded like a brand-new doormat.

  “Yes, he won’t have put two and two together. I’ll see whether Marie mentioned anything in particular at the time.”

  Lebreton was sitting on the sofa, his feet resting on a box of solved cases that he had repurposed as a footstool. Until that point, he and Rosière had only skimmed the surface of the Sauzelle case, so he was studying the blackboard to familiarize himself with all the various aspects. One of Torrez and Capestan’s problems was easy enough to resolve. Lebreton could have mentioned it out loud, but he was worried Capestan might see it as an attempt to undermine her in public. Being banished was already bad enough—the last thing they needed was to start lashing out at one another. Lebreton was observing his commander at the helm. She had a natural grace about her: gentle without being soft, firm without being hard. Authoritative, but empathetic, too. If she weren’t so hot headed, she could have been a topflight negotiator. But she was incapable of putting up with provocation. Whether it was inquiries, interrogations, or even darts, Capestan never played in defense—she was always on the attack. Lebreton tapped his knee with his thumb. He wavered. He would wait for the right moment.

  The commissaire was now making her way over to Dax. As she passed the sofa, she glanced quizzically at Rosière, who was perched comfortably between two cushions with her dog snoozing at her feet. She held up her superfluous cell phone:

  “Maëlle’s not answering. I’ll try her again later to see if she knew the old lady.”

  Capestan nodded and continued over to the IT specialist. She wanted him to look into Jallateau’s activities at the time of Marie Sauzelle’s murder. The squad was about as likely to obtain a warrant as a toad was to win the Nobel Prize, so they were having to cut some administrative corners. On paper at least, Dax was the man for the job.

  As she approached the lieutenant, Capestan realized he was drawing a Bart Simpson on Lewitz’s freshly erected board, and she started to have her doubts. By the time he had stuck his chewing gum on the cartoon character’s nose, she had given up hope entirely. She gave it a try all the same:

  “Lieutenant, you used to be in cybercrim . . . Can you still get around firewalls, break through security, that sort of thing?”

  Dax stood bolt upright and wrung his hands with pride.

  “Muscle memory! What are we looking for?”

  “Anything relating to Jallateau between April and August 2005: bank statements, telephone records, movements, his business, any henchmen . . . whatever you can find.”

  Dax nodded vigorously several times and cracked his knuckles. He was getting ready for his big comeback.

  Capestan smiled at the lieutenant and went back to her swivel chair. It was time for the commissaire to pick her way through the Guénan file with a renewed focus. This case had just become her own.

  A line was emerging. Lebreton and Rosière had been so focused on Jallateau that they had failed to consider the victim’s temperament. A sailor with that much perseverance, who gathers together hundreds of documents and puts the whole thing in writing, must have kept some sort of journal, almost like a ship’s logbook. If so, it would surely contain some vital clues. Capestan wanted to avoid broadcasting this oversight to the group, especially since relations between her and Lebreton were still frosty—better not make it more awkward. But she promised to tackle the issue the moment they were one-on-one.

  The studious atmosphere that had settled on the room was interrupted by the screech of Torrez’s chair on the floor. He crossed the room, his sheepskin jacket already on his back. The silence continued until the front door clicked shut.

  Midday, Capestan thought. Lunchtime. They would all make better progress with some food in their bellies.

  29

  Lebreton and Évrard had taken the whole squad’s order and gone to fetch burgers and fries. Back on the overcrowded terrace, the brown paper bags were distributed and each officer buried their nose inside to check that everything was present and correct. Pilote trotted from one to the other, desperately searching for the biggest pushover.

  Merlot set upon his cheeseburger with the expression of an intrepid explorer. He was discovering the virgin terrain of junk food, devouring the flabby bun with gusto and sending a jet of ketchup into the distance. His round pickle slice slid down the red sauce like a shaky surfer and landed on the capitaine’s already stained tie. Nonchalant as ever, he took a paper napkin and flicked the offending condiment onto the floor tiles of the terrace. The dog went over to inspect the spoils but seemed unconvinced, preferring to wait for something a little meatier to fall. Lewitz pointed at the animal, then swallowed and directed a question at Rosière:

  “Did you name him after a particular pilot?”

  “Yes. The first of a series.”

  This surprised Dax, who stopped chewing:

  “So you want more than one dog?”

  “No, series as in television series,” she said.

  Évrard closed the plastic lid on her barely touched salad and tore open a packet of petit-beurre cookies from the shopping bag, offering them around as she nibbled at the corners of her own. Dax held out an interested hand.

  “I bet you ten euros you can’t eat three in under a minute,” Évrard whispered.

  “No money!” Capestan said straightaway. “How many in a minute?”

  “Three,” Évrard repeated, nodding to suggest the odds were stacked in her favor.

  “Is that all?!” Dax blurted.

  He leapt to his feet, ready for action, shaking his arms and rotating his head to loosen his neck.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  A crowd rapidly formed around the contender. This foolish challenge reminded Capestan of so
mething, maybe a YouTube clip or a scene from a film. Three cookies in under a minute. Good, clean fun among colleagues. Dax stuffed in all three at once, his jaw going into overdrive as he tried to mash them up and get them down.

  Sitting with her back to the window, Capestan watched from a distance, deep in thought as she picked at her fries. Lebreton took this as his opportunity to have a quiet word with her:

  “I’m with you on the missing cat: it’s bizarre. If we want peace of mind, we have to look for the carrier.”

  Capestan sat up straight to show he had her attention. Lebreton continued in the same tone:

  “If we call Marie Sauzelle’s local vet, we should get a date for their last visit and a summary of the cat’s health. And the vet will know whether the animal had some sort of carrier. If the carrier is missing, then it means the murderer took it with him.”

  “Marie might have thrown it out when the cat died,” Capestan said.

  “You don’t throw that sort of thing out so quickly. Plus the vet can tell us if the cat had died a long time before.”

  “You’re right. The vet, the carrier. Good idea. I’ll look into it this afternoon. Thank you, commandant.”

  Dax was staring at the stopwatch. One minute, thirty seconds. He had failed. He was refusing to believe it. Lewitz picked up the baton, opting for a diametrically opposite technique: he nibbled each cookie in turn, biting continuously, like Bugs Bunny on a carrot.

  Capestan could have made the most of her talk with Lebreton to flag up her views on Guénan, but she was worried about coming across as overly competitive (“Think you can teach me a lesson? Have a listen to this . . .”). The commissaire did not like to use that sort of tone. Lebreton could sense she was holding something back.