“The old lady?”
“Guénan told her.”
At the time of their conversation at the commemoration, Marie Sauzelle had not made the link with the family she had met during boarding. But on seeing the photographs of Rosa and Antonio flicking past, her memories of the sailor’s tale were stirred. The thought had perplexed her, and she had innocently put the question to Valincourt.
One murder always leads to another. Valincourt looked at his son again. The boy was devastated. The son he loved so much; the son who shared Rosa’s blood. He was so young.
“I’m sorry,” Valincourt murmured.
Gabriel did not acknowledge the apology. He was close to collapse, but still he fought on:
“Guénan’s wife? Were you following me while I was on my search? Did you look at my cell phone? Did you do it to silence her? Was it my fault?”
Gabriel had all these questions, but Valincourt only gave him one answer:
“Nothing is your fault. Nothing. I did what I could, but you . . . You don’t deserve a single second of what you’re going through now. I’m sorry.”
Valincourt’s eyes were red and a few tears were starting to form. A long silence set in, and neither father nor son knew how to handle it. They stayed there like that, not moving, only half breathing. Then Gabriel stood up and shakily made his way to the door. When he opened it, he saw Manon leaning against the wall along the corridor. He walked to her slowly and fell into her arms.
Orsini was in line at the party shop. In addition to the banner, he had chosen balloons, three multicolored garlands, and several paper lanterns, two of which had a sun-and-moon pattern. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He looked at the name flashing on the screen: Chevalet, a journalist friend he had called on earlier in the investigation. Orsini sighed and brought the cell phone to his ear.
“Hi, Marcus,” came the voice down the line. “So, this story you promised me?”
Orsini thought about Valincourt’s crimes, then pictured the son, Gabriel. His own son had never had the chance to reach that age.
“Hi, Ludo. Afraid it didn’t come to anything in the end. Next time.”
He hung up. The shop owner smiled and handed him his items. Next to the counter was a stand displaying lots of pranks and practical jokes. Orsini picked out a packet of hot sweets. Those hot sweets always cracked him up.
Epilogue
The elevator stopped at the fifth floor. The doors opened with a grinding mechanical sound, and Capestan found herself looking at some legs. They turned out to belong to Orsini, who was wobbling precariously on a stepladder trying to hang the WELCOME banner above the door. He anxiously steadied himself by gripping the door frame, then turned to her:
“Good afternoon, commissaire. We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
“Hello, Orsini. Waiting for me for what?”
Orsini was trying to insert the thumbtack with such vigor you would have thought the frame was made of reinforced concrete.
“To get ready for the housewarming.”
“The housewarming? First I’ve heard of it.”
“Ah,” Orsini said with an air of irritation, sucking his injured thumb before confessing: “Perhaps it was a surprise. I’m not sure, best to ask Rosière.”
Of course it was best to ask Rosière. On entering the living room, she saw Évrard and Lewitz hard at work around a desk that they had transformed into a banquet table, covered in a paper cloth with a red-spiral pattern. The walls were adorned with garlands, and Dax was decorating the windows with a can of spray paint that, judging by the smell, would not be rubbing off anytime soon. Colorful paper lanterns dressed the lightbulbs that until then had been bare. The commissariat resembled a primary school the day before a fête. Over in the kitchen, Capestan caught a glimpse of Torrez strapped into a cotton Knorr apron. Since his discharge from the hospital, the squad had seemed a lot more relaxed about having him around. They still weren’t patting him on the back or making eye contact, but fewer hairs were standing on end when he walked past.
Armchairs, desks, sofas, tables: all the furniture was pushed up against the walls, making sure there was ample space for dancing. Lebreton had just finished rigging up some speakers. Rosière, with a green balloon in one hand and a pump in the other, was deep in conversation with Merlot, who was sitting on his ass offering moral support.
“Seaside or mountains!” Rosière spat. “Why should you have to choose one or the other? Ever heard of having the best of both? What’s wrong with people! It’s always A or B, Beatles or Stones—”
“Pink Floyd!” Dax hollered across the room.
“. . . Hallyday or Mitchell . . .”
“Sardou!” Dax barked again, not quite grasping her point but enjoying the game nonetheless.
“Dog or cat, sweet or savory, I’m more into this, I’m more into that . . . It’s bullshit! Why stop there? Are you more into tables or chairs?” Rosière said.
She tore the balloon from the pump and knotted the end with an expert maneuver. She was wearing a golden satin skirt suit that seemed to have been chosen with an after-party at the Moulin Rouge in mind. Her emerald eyeliner duplicated her green gaze, which was trained on the capitaine, challenging him for an answer. But it would take more than that to breach Merlot’s defenses, accustomed as he was to holding forth from dawn till dusk. As for him, he was gleaming like a freshly minted coin, his bald pate buffed to perfection.
“Well, quite, my dear girl! Choice! Endless choice, just as I was saying.”
Fed up, Rosière turned around to see Capestan.
“Not bad, hey?” she said with a sweeping gesture across the room and its party decorations. “Closed cases, a guilty man before the public prosecutor, new wallpaper . . . We thought—”
“We?”
Rosière smiled, pretending to be contrite before carrying on:
“‘We’ thought that was all worthy of a celebration—it’s high time this commissariat popped some corks! What do you say?”
“‘We’ did a fantastic job. Who’s invited?”
“Well, everyone from the squad. But I thought maybe you’d like to ask Buron yourself?”
“I’ll call him.”
Capestan retired to the window, her gaze lost on the toppling, higgledy-piggledy buildings of rue Saint-Denis. There was nothing in line about this street, which looked as if it could do with a trip to a good orthodontist. The commissaire chatted with Buron for a couple of minutes before hanging up.
Lebreton came and stood next to her, puffing away on a blue balloon.
“So, Valincourt?” he said between blows.
“Thanks to his signed confession, Buron was able to hand things straight to the public prosecutor’s department,” Capestan said. “None of our business anymore.”
“Yeah,” Dax shouted (Dax always shouted). “We nailed this case! Think about those goons back in the day who found zilch—in your face, Crim!”
“Well, it was Valincourt’s case. It wasn’t exactly in his interests to find the guilty party . . . ,” Orsini pointed out, having wandered over to the group.
“Yeah, big deal,” Dax said, still happy.
Hunched over the stereo, Lewitz put on a CD, letting the first few notes blare out before skipping to the next track with a confused look at the album cover. Évrard automatically twitched along to each note, stopping and starting with the DJ. She was making a face—something was bothering her. She came over to join in the conversation:
“I’ve been wondering . . . Why did Valincourt palm the Sauzelle case off on us? It was risky. He likes a gamble, that man.”
“I’m going to check with Buron, but my guess is that the box marked CLOSED CASES might have taken a walk while Valincourt was away on holiday.”
After another puff into his balloon, Lebreton gave it a look that indicated a clear intention to cut down on his smoking, then joined the conversation himself:
“The son?”
“Poor boy,” Rosière said. �
�He must hate him.”
“No,” Capestan said in response. “Valincourt brought him up, and well, for twenty years. He thought he was acting out of a sense of duty, to keep his son safe. He plotted a course for him and stay focused on his objective, to the point of committing four murders. Gabriel can’t hate him, he could never hate him. But he is in shock. This morning, he still wasn’t angry or sad—just nothing. Completely stunned. Luckily for him, his fiancée hasn’t once left his side.”
A hint of sadness fell over the squad and each of them returned to their jobs.
Three hours later, the room was a scene of total chaos. Dax was constantly cranking up the music, with Orsini constantly cranking it down. Rosière and Merlot were sinking every bottle within reach, whereas Lebreton was carefully nurturing his beside his glass. Over in the corner, Torrez was sorting through the CDs. In the middle of a rock ’n’ roll with Capestan, he had been delighted to sprain his own knee. Évrard and Lewitz were literally in a trance, having not left the dance floor for a single track, not even when Torrez insisted on playing his crooner classics. Capestan could make out Pilou in the kitchen nuzzling his water bowl manically against the wall, defying its antiskid rubber bottom and gouging a nick in the new paintwork. When he had finally had an elegant sufficiency, the dog trotted back to Rosière, water dripping from his chops as he went.
Capestan and Buron were standing side by side, propping up the buffet.
“So was it you who swiped Valincourt’s file?” Capestan roared over the music.
“Yes,” Buron said. “That failure was a stain on his career. I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me.”
“And how did you make the link with Guénan? Valincourt wasn’t on that case.”
“No, but he had just arrived at number 36 and he spent a lot of time hanging around there. A few years later, when he joined my team, his HR file came my way. I saw that he’d been living in Key West the same year as the accident. It was a coincidence, and a completely innocent soul would have mentioned it. On top of that, a few items from the case notes had gone missing . . .”
“Hold on, you suspected him of murder and then covered for him for twenty years?”
“No, not at all,” Buron said, his tone more obsequious than necessary. “But I did think he’d been negligent. I took the creation of this squad as my chance to clear up the matter. Anyhow, Capestan, you suspected me at one point in this case . . .”
“No, not once,” the commissaire retorted.
The force of her denial bordered on ridicule, and a broad smile played across the chief’s lips. But another question was still nagging at her:
“Why didn’t you bust him yourself?”
“I didn’t want to bring down a fellow officer. I have a reputation to uphold.”
“And you had no problem with me damaging mine?”
“Not really, no,” he said, not ashamed in the least. “Tell me, Capestan. I received a speeding ticket for Brigadier Lewitz. Sixty miles per hour in a built-up area . . .”
“Yes, I’d be grateful if you could waive that for him—he doesn’t have many points left.”
“. . . speeding on a Motocrotte?”
“No, those don’t exist anymore—it was a street sweeper.”
Rosière and Merlot’s chatter reached them in dribs and drabs over the notes of Mika’s “Relax”:
“. . . when it comes to the planet, animals, anything, I only buy organic, top-of-the-range . . .”
“All that’s mighty costly, though . . .”
“As it should be! If rich people buy crappy stuff, too, you can’t complain when that’s the only thing available!”
“Indeed! But . . .”
“In our society, you vote every time you get your wallet out. Fuck the ballot box, it’s the shopping cart that counts! Speaking of which,” she said, holding out her glass.
As Merlot tipped a quarter of the bottle into her glass and a tenth onto the carpet, Lebreton chimed in:
“Take a trip around a couple of dictatorships and you’ll see that the ballot box doesn’t count for much there, either . . .”
“Still,” Rosière said, with a nod to her vermilion Gigondas, “every time you drink, every time you eat, you vote!”
“Well, that makes you an exemplary citizen,” Lebreton said, turning his shoulder on her.
“As for me, I . . . ,” Merlot started, but he was interrupted by Lewitz, who was running all over the place yelling:
“I won, I won, I won! Three in a minute!”
With each syllable, a spray of cookie crumbs came spewing from his mouth. Rosière, incredulous, grabbed Évrard’s arm as she walked past.
“He ate three petits-beurres?”
“No, they were sponge fingers, but he’s so happy I can’t face disqualifying him.”
Capestan scooped up a cream cheese sandwich from the buffet, and Buron followed suit. She had to move aside to dodge a yellow balloon that was dropping to the ground from the ceiling.
“So,” she said. “If I understand right, our squad was set up expressly to settle your personal scores.”
The chief’s basset hound eyes were heavy with sadness.
“No, this wasn’t about ‘scores.’ Alexandre was my friend, you know. It was my duty to investigate him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Your squad is my halfway house, Capestan. A temporary solution. It’s not as if I’ve created the ‘Super Justice’ league—you’re just a third team, on the sidelines where you’re beyond suspicion. Well put together, mind you,” he added with a smile.
“You could have told it to me straight.”
“Until now, I wasn’t sure it would even work.”
The balloon had found its way onto the dance floor, where it was bouncing merrily from officer to officer, each of them doing their best to spare it. Dax, stomping along to the beat, was digging into a bowl of candy. His jaw clenched as he bit into them, and he’d wince before going in again, intrigued. He offered one to Lewitz, with a shrug that suggested he found them weird but nice.
“It works, all right,” Capestan confirmed. “And to keep the momentum going, I’m requesting at least one functioning car, as well as some respect and consideration.”
“I’ll see about the car.”
“That’s the most important thing,” Capestan said, munching a goat cheese cracker.
Buron finished off his and wiped his hands on a paper napkin with little red hearts on it.
“I know you deserve better,” he said. “But after all your misdemeanors, I had no choice. It was the only way out—”
“I couldn’t be happier here, Buron,” the commissaire said, looking at her squad.
Évrard, Dax, and Lewitz were tormenting the downstairs neighbors with their dance moves. Torrez was limping around, his arm still in its sling. Rosière was trying, in vain, to get Orsini drunk. And Merlot’s snoring was competing with the music.
Lebreton met Capestan’s eye and raised his glass toward her. She clinked him in return.
“This place suits me just fine,” she said.
Lying at Rosière’s feet, the edge of his lip flopped over her Louboutin, Pilou was stealthily keeping an eye on things, scoping out the surroundings with a keen muzzle. Wafts of charcuterie; tottering, happy humans . . . it was all very promising. A few scratches behind the ear and some saucisson were definitely in the cards.
Pilote stretched out a paw to embark on his hunt, but he felt his mistress’s hand curtail his rump’s upward trajectory. He sat back down, and with a flash of canine inspiration, looked up at the corpulent fellow next to Rosière on the sofa. The man grinned and handed him a canapé laden with pâté, which Pilou guzzled down in one gulp. Charity begins at home.
Thank you
My infinite thanks to all of the following for making this book possible and, in so doing, changing my life (nothing more, nothing less):
Stéfanie Delestré, my editor at Albin Michel, without whom I would not be able to say (over and over and o
ver again) the words “my editor.”
Patrick Raynal, the Grand Master of detective fiction, whose support for the squad has always been beyond incredible.
To everyone at Albin Michel, my French publishers, from the graphic designers and copy editors to the press team, reps, and big bosses, without whom my squad would be nothing more than a stack of paper for sale at my house.
My friends Marie La Fonta and Brigitte Lefebvre, for their kind and unswerving support.
Thank you to the following, without whom I would not be a professional writer, or at least not the same writer: Sylvie Overnoy, the ideal boss for the budding writer, especially as she is one herself; Sophie Bajos de Hérédia, for her belief in my (several) applications; the comic-in-chief Henri Pouradier Duteil; and Monsieur Simonet, my French teacher at Collège Jean-Marmoz.
For their good-hearted readings, rereadings, and re-rereadings, their constructive criticism, and their vigorous compliments, I could never thank the following enough: Anne-Isabelle Masfaraud (record holder for the number of readings, gold-medal winner for rooting out incoherence, pep-talk champion); Dominique Hénaff (top dog both for his unconditional support and his keen eye for detail); Patrick Hénaff, Marie-Thérèse Leclair, Pierre Hénaff, Brigitte Petit, Isabelle Alves, Chloé Szulzinger, and Marie-Ange Guillaume.
Jean-François Masfaraud, for his wonderful idea for the original French title, Poulets grillés.
Christophe Caupenne, former RAID commandant, for his help that was as kind as it was valuable; and Catherine Azzopardi, for her initiative and spontaneity in introducing us.
Antoine Caro and Lina Pinto, for their comments, encouragement, and the time they dedicated to reading my manuscript.
The Awkward Squad Page 24
