Autumn, All the Cats Return

by Philippe Georget

The head of the forensic police blushed. Despite his forty years of service and surly air, he still loved compliments. He cleared his throat before beginning.

  “The murderer acted alone and took no precautions. We were able to get some excellent sets of fingerprints off the door handles, the chairs, and the handcuffs. Unfortunately, for the moment they are of no use to us because the murderer is in neither our files nor those of the gendarmerie. That’s probably one reason why the he didn’t bother to take precautions.”

  “They’ll be useful to us later on,” Castello replied with a certain optimism. “They’ll provide solid proof once we’ve got our hooks into him. Anything else, Jean?”

  “The killer used a handgun, probably a rather old model 9 mm. The bullet was found in a molding. He attached his victim to a chair with handcuffs. But we can’t do much with that, either, for the time being. They’re a common kind easily found on the internet.”

  “You can buy handcuffs on the internet?” Lambert was surprised.

  “You can buy anything on the internet,” Llach told him.

  “Yes, but handcuffs . . . to do what?”

  Several of the men smiled. Molina put his hand on his young colleague’s arm.

  “They’re also found in sex shops. Some people like them. I’ll explain it to you someday, Thierry.”

  Castello didn’t care for this excursus and immediately refocused the discussion.

  “How did the killer get into the apartment?”

  “There was no trace of a break-in. It looks like the victim let him in.”

  “So we can conclude that Martinez knew his murderer?” Llach was always good at drawing quick explanations based on simple arguments.

  Jean Pagès pulled a face. The wrinkles on his face got even deeper.

  “That’s one hypothesis, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a victim innocently opened the door to his murderer without their ever having met before.”

  Joan Llach frowned. His thick brown brows formed a stubborn line over his dark eyes. “Nonetheless, with all the increased security these days, old people don’t open their doors so easily to people they don’t know . . . ”

  “That’s probably true for most of them, but not all,” Pagès replied. “Some remain very gullible. All you have to do is give them a calendar from the mailman or the fire brigade and they’ll let you come in. They’ll even take out their wallets and open them in front of you.”

  “It’s only late October. That’s a little too early for calendars,” Llach replied, splitting hairs.

  “That was just an example. But people open their doors just as easily to electric company workers, census takers, or even someone pretending to be a policeman.”

  Castello addressed Sebag:

  “Gilles, what do you think?”

  Sebag hated to be called upon that way. Considering him the de facto head of the team, Castello often asked him to give his opinion when there were arguments among the inspectors. But not only was Gilles not the head of anything or anyone, he had also refused all the promotions that had recently been proposed to him. He eluded the question:

  “Both hypotheses are plausible.”

  Castello, annoyed, turned to Pagès.

  “Anything else?”

  “There is one thing that might have reassured the victim and led him to open the door to his murderer. For the moment, I’m not sure, but we can’t exclude the possibility that the killer is also an elderly person.”

  “Come, now!” the superintendent said.

  “An old gunslinger,” Molina joked.

  Jean Pagès ignored the remark.

  “On the back of the chair facing the victim I found a white hair . . . ”

  Loud sniggering interrupted him:

  “Wow, a white hair found in a retiree’s apartment,” Molina scoffed, “what a discovery!”

  The head of the forensic police did not turn to look at him and continued to address Costello.

  “The hair seemed to me to be of a different shade of white and length than that of the victim.”

  “A retiree who sometimes had other retirees as guests,” Molina went on, “another great discovery! I’m willing to concede that your job consists of splitting hairs but here you’ve really gone too far!”

  Jean Pagès bit his lip. He was having trouble controlling himself and now regretted having postponed his retirement for a year. He’d planned to leave at the end of the summer, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “I’m well aware of who has gone too far,” Castello retorted, coming to Pagès’s aid. “We won’t get anywhere by making those kinds of sarcastic, indeed aggressive, remarks.”

  The superintendent glared at Molina. Then he brightened and adopted a softer, almost honeyed tone.

  “You have to admit, Jean, that basically—and only basically—Molina’s remark is not entirely groundless. I trust your intuitions, but they’ll have to be confirmed. Did you notice anything else in the apartment?”

  “No, nothing else,” Pagès grumbled.

  Castello turned to Lambert.

  “Your turn, Thierry. What did you learn from canvassing the neighbors?”

  The young inspector’s eyes opened wide in surprise. To be sure, he’d been the one who had begun the canvass of the neighbors, but he’d quickly been joined by Llach, and wasn’t expecting to be given the floor at the meeting. The team’s most recent recruit, he had come to work at the Perpignan police headquarters one year earlier, after completing his training.

  He sat up straight on his chair and this movement alone released into the small meeting room the spicy aroma of cheap deodorant. Molina held his nose and looked at Sebag. Lambert had a phobia about body odor, and his worst fear was that he might smell bad. The time he’d spent around the corpse must have led him to use up a whole bottle of deodorant in one day.

  “As you said a little while ago, Superintendent, he was apparently an ordinary retiree. His neighbors had no complaints about him, except that he sometimes turned up the sound on his television a little too much. They said he’d been living in that apartment for some fifteen years. Martinez had been a winegrower, and you said that, too, Chief, a winegrower in Les Aspres, but he’d gone bankrupt and had to sell his land. No family, no children, probably just a girlfriend. Well, I mean, a woman friend. Since he moved to Moulin-à-Vent, Martinez’s main occupations seem to have been crossword puzzles and pétanque. He also belonged to an association of Pieds-Noirs.”

  “Hmm . . . ” Castello was nodding pensively. “The neighbors didn’t notice anything unusual these last few days?”

  “Since the murder took place at least five days ago, they couldn’t say. They don’t remember anything.”

  “What about the neighbor woman who discovered the body? Did you see her?”

  “She was in shock. She was crying and trembling all over. It hit her hard . . . ”

  “What made her finally look in on her neighbor this morning?”

  “At first we thought it was the smell that had tipped her off, but in fact it was Martinez’s woman friend, the one I mentioned a little while ago, who asked the neighbor to ring his doorbell. At the moment, she’s on vacation at her daughter’s home in Barcelona. Martinez hadn’t replied to her last telephone messages and she was getting worried.”

  François Ménard raised his hand to indicate that he wanted to say something.

  “Her first name wouldn’t be Joséphine, would it?”

  “Yes, I think it is,” Lambert said, spreading out in front of him his notes rapidly taken on supermarket receipts. “Here it is. Josette Vidal.”

  “I found a recent postcard signed by that Josette,” Ménard explained.

  “Since you’ve taken the floor, François, I’m going to ask you to keep it,” the superintendent said. “You were assigned to go through the papers found in
the victim’s apartment.”

  In his turn, Ménard spread out his notes, unfolding several sheets covered with dense writing.

  “Everything is very run-of-the-mill in fact, the kind of thing everyone keeps in his drawers: bank statements, gas and electricity bills, a family record book, a few photos—not many—a property insurance folder, letters and postcards, mainly from this Josette Vidal. In short, nothing of fundamental importance, but I was able to glean from all these documents a little information that adds some details to what we’ve just said.”

  His long face bent over his notes.

  “For instance, that Bernard Martinez is the first child of Jean Martinez, who was a shopkeeper in Algiers, and Odette Blanchard, a seamstress. He had a younger brother who was born in 1937 and died the following year. Like most Pieds-Noirs, Martinez returned to France in the summer of 1962. He landed with his parents in Sète. They went to live in Marseilles, he went to Perpignan. His parents died in the 1980s.”

  Ménard took a deep breath. -

  “In February 1963, he bought twelve hectares of vineyards in Terrats, near Thuir. He worked them until his business was put into receivership in 1997. The subsidies for pulling out the vines and the sale of the land allowed him to pay off his debts. Since then he’s been living on welfare.”

  Ménard looked over his notes, shuffling his papers.

  “So far as we can tell, nothing was stolen from Martinez’s apartment. His credit card and cash were still in his wallet.”

  “Valuable objects, maybe?” the superintendent suggested.

  “Impossible to say for the moment,” Ménard replied. “We’ll have to find the woman friend Thierry mentioned. She’ll be able to tell us if there’s something missing. But it’s not very likely, since he wasn’t rich.”

  “So there’s little chance that the motive was money?” Llach asked with concern.

  “Very little, in fact,” Castello answered.

  The superintendent took a few seconds to think before he took up the question that seemed to him the most worrisome.

  “For the moment, the letters painted on a door of the apartment seem to be the only lead we have.”

  At the back of the room, Moreno and Raynaud, who hadn’t yet shown any interest in this case, finally stirred. After clearing his throat, Moreno said in his bass voice:

  “In other words, it’s a political crime!”

  “Vengeance taken on the OAS,” his partner added.

  Castello raised his hands to temper the enthusiasm of these two, the most uncontrollable on the team. Raynaud and Moreno never left each other’s side. They spoke to each other only in whispers, looking warily about as if they were exchanging top-secret national security information. They told themselves that they were always on the lookout for the big case that would make their careers, but they hung out in shabby bars and shady milieus in which nothing important would ever happen.

  “Easy now, gentlemen, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Castello advised. “It’s true that at this stage in the investigation, anything can be imagined. And the press, unfortunately, will do that soon enough. Our job is to proceed step by step. And the first thing to do is to check any connections Martinez might have had with that organization. What do we know at this point about the victim’s distant past?”

  The question was addressed chiefly to Ménard and Lambert.

  “I didn’t find any documents in Martinez’s apartment that indicated a link to the OAS,” Ménard replied. “Except that he subscribed to some pretty immoderate magazines for Pieds-Noirs.”

  The superintendent turned to Lambert.

  “What did the neighbors say, Thierry?”

  Lambert squirmed on his chair and stammered:

  “Uh, I didn’t think to ask them. At that point I didn’t know he was involved with the OA . . . the OA thing!”

  The superintendent sighed and glared at the young cop. Sebag quietly looked at his phone. It was already 7 P.M. Putting his hands under the table, he began composing an SMS to tell Claire that he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner.

  Castello put his hands flat on the table and took a deep breath.

  “I think it would be useful here to remind you of what happened back then. I knew you weren’t necessarily experts on the Algerian War, but I thought you would at least have heard of the OAS.”

  Molina elbowed Lambert.

  “The OAS,” the superintendent began, “was a clandestine movement created in 1961 in reaction to the FLN’s terrorist attacks.”

  Castello stared at Lambert again and took care to speak very clearly:

  “FLN stood for Front de li-bé-ra-tion na-tion-ale, an independence movement that had begun armed resistance in 1954.”

  Then he went on, speaking to the group as a whole:

  “So the OAS, in reaction to the FLN’s actions and to General de Gaulle’s policy of self-determination . . . ”

  He paused again.

  “Self-determination, Lambert, do you have some idea of what that means?”

  “Uh . . . Vaguely, yeah,” the young inspector mumbled.

  “What about General de Gaulle?” Molina asked maliciously.

  “Ah, sure . . . the general . . . de Gaulle, yeah, I know about . . . ”

  “By the way, how is he?”

  Jacques’s joke made the inspectors laugh and even managed to elicit a faint smile on the superintendent’s face, but he continued his account.

  “So the French in Algeria who were against independence created the OAS, which in less than two years set off a good ten thousand bombs, not only in Algeria, but also here in France. They are said to have killed more than 1,600 people.”

  The figure made a cold shiver run down the policemen’s backs.

  “Yes, I know, that seems incredible today, but I checked the number: 1,600 deaths. The OAS attacked mainly Arabs but it also executed French police officers who were doing their job.”

  A scandalized murmur rumbled through the room.

  “Some of the leaders of the OAS were shot after they were arrested. Many of them did time in prison. But most were granted amnesty in the late 1960s.”

  Castello waited a few moments to be sure that he had his whole team’s attention.

  “The letters ‘OAS’ written near the body thus draw our attention to this troubled period, which is still very sensitive, especially in the community of the former French of Algeria—a community which, I remind you, still includes more than ten thousand people living in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales. And I assume you are aware that here in Perpignan there have recently been tensions between the Pied-Noir associations and their opponents regarding several monuments erected in public places. Each time there have been demonstrations for and against the monuments, and conflicts have been narrowly avoided. In short, we are walking on eggshells here, and I can tell you that many people around here will be keeping a close eye on our investigation.”

  A leaden silence followed. The inspectors remained pensive. Nobody in the police liked to work under the pressure of politics and the media.

  “However, we will not exclude any lead,” Castello went on. “Including the possibility of a personal settling of accounts disguised as a political matter. Tomorrow Llach and Lambert will meet with Martinez’s woman friend. In particular, they will go with her to the apartment to see if she can confirm that nothing has been stolen. Raynaud and Moreno will investigate Martinez’s past occupations. We have to find out whether the bankruptcy of his business involved legal disputes.”

  Sebag took a sideways glance at his two colleagues and noted with pleasure that they were disappointed not to be assigned to the political lead. Then he concentrated again on the superintendent’s instructions.

  “Sebag and Molina begin by looking into the local Pied-Noir community, and question first of all the officials of
the association Martinez belonged to. We have to learn very quickly if the victim belonged to the OAS or not. Then they will meet with the people who were opposed to the various Pied-Noir monuments. Finally, Ménard will work particularly on the historical aspect. I think you already have an appointment with a professor at the university?”

  “Yes, he’s a specialist on the Algerian War. More on the FLN than on the OAS, unfortunately, but he will probably be able to direct me to colleagues and people who were there at the time.”

  Castello looked at his inspectors, one after the other, and then concluded gravely:

  “Gentlemen, I’m counting on you to be here first thing tomorrow. We have to move fast because there is one fact that we haven’t yet mentioned because it was too soon, and, as I repeated a little while ago, I don’t want to cut corners. But I’m sure that some of you have already thought about it.”

  Again he surveyed his inspectors.

  “If we’re dealing here with an old desire to take revenge on the OAS, we can’t exclude the possibility that this murder is the first of a series. Dismissed.”

  Molina made a phone call while Sebag collected the papers from the file on Mathieu’s accident that a breeze had scattered all over the office.

  “That’s fine, Mr. Albouker. See you tomorrow.”

  Molina hung up.

  “The president of the Pied-Noir Circle can see us tomorrow morning at 10:30. He’d have preferred afternoon because he wants his treasurer to be there, and the treasurer isn’t available in the morning. But I told him we had another appointment in the afternoon.”

  “That was the right thing to do. If we did as people want, we’d be working day and night. And then I’ve had enough for my first day back after vacation.”

  “The treasurer is retired, so he can make an effort. I’ve had enough for today, too. And I still feel like I’m carrying around with me the smell of that body mixed with Lambert’s deodorant—a disgusting mixture that would be enough to drive off the most eager nymphomaniac!”

  Molina got up and put on his jacket.

  “I have a particularly bad feeling about this case. I’m afraid we’re opening an incredible can of worms. And we’re going to be under pressure.”