Molina looked up.
“By the way, has anyone called yet?”
He didn’t wait for a reply before plunging back into his reading of his paper. Sebag was still looking at the photos of his colleague. Once again, he said to himself they ought to reverse their walls. Molina had his back to his own world and Sebag to his: photos of Claire, Léo, and Sévérine, in swimsuits at the beach, in ski clothes in the mountains, or sitting at a table on the terrace at home. It would be logical to change things around, but he didn’t propose it. Because people didn’t put their memories on the walls to admire them but rather to assert their personalities: this is my place and here are my tastes, my passions, and the people I love. It all seemed as puerile as it was universal. Some days he thought it was ridiculous, even pathetic. But he always ended up telling himself that after all, it was a more civilized way to mark territory than pissing on the ground.
His telephone rang, tearing him away from his reflections. The switchboard was connecting him with the first call. He listened, asked a few questions, and took notes. When he hung up, he met the questioning eyes of his partner.
“It was a resident of Saint-Cyprien who passed by there on Sunday. Apparently at the time of the murder. He saw a white car parked next to a blue Audi. A SEAT, he said.”
“He didn’t get the license number, obviously?”
“Obviously.”
“But it’s interesting for a first call.”
Sebag and Molina received a dozen phone calls that morning. Most of them were of no interest. In addition to the first, they gave serious consideration to only one other, from a young woman who had gone to see her mother in a retirement home in Canet on Sunday afternoon. This second witness offered no further information regarding the model of the vehicle, which she described as “a small white car,” but she seemed to remember that the license plate was foreign, maybe Spanish.
“She remembers or she thinks she remembers?” Molina groaned.
“We work with what we have,” Sebag said, philosophically. “Now we have to find out what Llach and Lambert learned from Roman’s neighbors.”
“Do you think it was worthwhile sending them down there? He wasn’t killed at home.”
“It’s not impossible that the killer did some reconnaissance near his house. He might even have planned to kill Roman at home, and then, seeing that it was too dangerous—because of neighbors who were too curious, for instance—decided to lure him to the Saint-Cyprien road instead.”
“Well, that seems to me a little complicated . . . ”
Sebag shrugged.
“The boss told us not to forget our fundamentals. Investigating the nearby area is part of that.”
“Nearby what?” Molina persisted. “Because he wasn’t killed in his house.”
Sebag was no longer listening to his partner’s quibbles. He had just picked up his phone to call Llach. He repeated out loud he information Joan conveyed to him.
“Concordant testimonies, you say. How many? We also had two. They mentioned a small white car. No certainty regarding the model. One of them mentioned a Clio or a SEAT. The other one mentioned a Spanish license plate. Hey, that’s great, man! Wait, I’m writing down the names and addresses.”
As he hung up, Sebag couldn’t help having a gleam of victory in his eyes.
“O.K., O.K.,” Molina grumbled. “But small white cars, even if licensed in Spain, are not exactly rare around here. In fact, they’re very common. That’s not enough to give us a lead. If at least we could be sure about the model . . . a SEAT or a Clio . . . ”
Sebag suddenly froze. The last word had shocked his neurons and triggered fleeting images in his mind. The area around Martinez’s apartment. The Moulin-à-Vent quarter. A white care licensed in Spain. He took the file on Mathieu’s accident out of his drawer. As he flipped through it he asked Molina:
“Do you remember the estimated date the medical examiner gave for Martinez’s death?”
“Uh . . . no, I don’t recall, a Wednesday or a Thursday,” Molina said, surprised. “What does that have to do with what we were saying?”
“Could you find me the exact information, please. The estimated day and hour?”
Jacques was going to protest when he saw on Gilles’s face the signs of the inspired prophet that he had learned to recognize. Sebag clenched his teeth, frowned, and hardly breathed. His eyes shone with a strange light. He seemed to be in an altered state. Molina would not have been surprised to see him start levitating over his desk,.
“You’re red-hot. You’re onto something there.”
“No, I don’t know,” Sebag said in halfhearted denial as he went compulsively through the pages of the file on the accident.
“That’s right, that’s right, play me for a fool, too . . . ” Molina scoffed, but in a low voice to avoid disturbing his partner.
Sebag found what he was looking for and put his finger on a specific line.
“Well?” he said impatiently.
Molina clicked his mouse nervously several times.
“It’s all right, I’m looking for your information, I’m opening the file. There . . . The medical examiner’s report. O.K., I found it: The death of Bernard Martinez is estimated to have occurred on Wednesday, probably in the late afternoon.”
“Shit . . . that’s not possible!”
“With you, everything is possible.”
“5:15—do you consider that already late afternoon?”
“It might . . . ”
“Holy shit!”
Molina was getting impatient in turn.
“Are you going to tell me someday?”
Sebag looked at his colleague without seeing him. Beyond Molina, he was seeing Moulin-à-Vent, the street where Mathieu had lost his life. He grimaced as he imagined the collision.
“Hello?” Molina was waving his hand before Gilles’s eyes. “Hello? Madame Irma, are you with us?”
Sebag suddenly shook himself.
“Yes . . . ”
“Are you going to explain it to me now?”
“Mathieu, my daughter’s friend—his accident took place that same afternoon at 5:15.”
“And so?”
“In the same Moulin-à-Vent quarter, next to the Saint Paul church.”
“Well, now . . . ”
“That’s only two hundred meters from Martinez’s apartment.”
“Do you think . . . ”
“The driver of the van said he had to swerve because of a car that had suddenly appeared on his right.”
“Fascinating.”
“According to him, it was a white Clio licensed in Spain.”
Molina immediately stopped his mocking comments.
“What are you suggesting there? That Martinez’s killer caused that accident?”
Put so crudely, the hypothesis seemed outlandish to Sebag as well. But in his heart of hearts he felt it was plausible.
“Well, why not?” he finally said. “Does that seem too far-fetched?”
Molina thought for three seconds.
“It’s just that it would be a very odd coincidence, after all. The medical examiner’s window was pretty big: 5:15 is the very beginning of ‘late afternoon.’ And then, this morning’s only witness who was fairly certain talked about a SEAT. Those who said ‘Clio or SEAT’ were the ones who weren’t sure.”
“So in short you don’t believe it?”
“When I try to judge the facts objectively, it seems to me pretty shaky, but . . . ”
“But?”
“When I look at you and see you that inspired, I want to believe it.”
Sebag stood up.
“So, O.K., let’s go have a look around in Canet, then!”
“Shall we interview Llach’s witnesses ourselves?”
“Yes. And also one of t
he people who called us this morning. The one who saw a SEAT works in a tavern there.”
“Where?”
“Place de la Méditerranée.”
Molina glanced at his watch.
“Perfect! I’m beginning to get a little peckish.”
“You’re always peckish. And thirsty.”
“I wouldn’t have anything against some nice cool rosé, in fact.”
“With you, one knows where it begins, but never when it ends. Do you know the proverb?”
“Aïe!”
“Eating makes you thirsty.”
“So, here’s to your health!”
Sebag and Molina were basking in the sun on the tavern’s terrace. The meal had been acceptable, not great. Gilles had had filet of hake with vegetables and Jacques prime rib with shallots. The table in the tavern spread out over the paving stones of the main square in Canet-Plage. Wearing dark glasses, the two inspectors ate side by side, facing the sea and the sun. There were only a few small cotton balls still floating in the blue sky over the Albera Range.
Sebag spoke to the waiter when he put the bill on their table.
“Are you Sébastien Puig?”
“No. Sébastien is working inside today.”
“Could you ask him to come out, please?”
The waiter hesitated for a moment, then obeyed. A second waiter soon came to stand between the inspectors and the sun.
“What can I bring you?”
Sebag showed him his card and asked him to sit down.
“This concerns your phone call this morning.”
“If I’d known you were going to show up at the place where I work, I wouldn’t have called.”
“We’re very sorry but it’s urgent.”
Sébastien smiled sardonically as he looked at their faces reddened by the sun.
“I can see that, yeah.”
Sebag sat up.
“This won’t take long. I’m the one who had you on the phone a little while ago and I need to know one more thing. You told me that you’d seen a car on the road between Saint-Cyprien and Canet. A SEAT, right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh . . . is it important?”
“It could be.”
“The problem is that I no longer remember very well. I didn’t pay that much attention. But there weren’t many cars on the road on Sunday, and it did seem to me that it was a SEAT, yes. I was coming home from work, we hadn’t had many customers for Sunday at noon. But with the rain that was pouring down, that was predictable, there was nobody out anywhere. And also a blue Audi parked alongside the beach. I think it was a SEAT, yeah, but I couldn’t swear to it.”
The policemen didn’t persist. They thanked the waiter and paid the bill.
“The wine’s on me,” Sebag said.
“You hardly touched it . . . ”
“Precisely, that makes up for it.”
“That makes no sense!”
“I know, but I’ll pay.”
Molina didn’t try to understand. He headed for the car.
“We could walk there, it’s only two steps away,” Sebag suggested.
“But afterward we’d have to come back. Two steps plus two steps, that makes four steps. It would waste our time. I’m just saying, this is about work, right?”
“You must be joking . . . O.K., I’ll walk there and you meet me with the car.”
Five minutes later, Sebag was approaching a small blue house while Molina parked the car. At the window, he saw a curtain suddenly drawn shut. He’d had time to glimpse the thin face of a woman around seventy years old. The mailbox bore the name of Madeleine Bonneau. They rang the bell but the echoes of a harmonious carillon were not followed by any sound of footsteps or a door opening in the house. They saw only a slight quiver behind the curtain.
Sebag looked at the notes Llach had given him. Madeleine Bonneau had been an English teacher in Niort, she’d been retired for ten years, and she spent half the year in Catalonia. In the file Sebag found a landline telephone number and dialed it on his cell phone. This time a metallic cooing sounded inside the house. Only three times.
“Hello?” an alert but unfriendly voice answered.
“Hello, Mme Bonneau, we’re two policemen from Perpignan. We’re waiting in front of your gate. We’d like to talk to you.”
“I already talked to policemen this morning.”
“Yes, we know. But we’d like a few further details.”
“I have nothing more to say.”
“Then we won’t take much of your time.”
He hung up immediately to accelerate the process. The sound of a key turning in a lock was heard. Followed by the sound of two bolts being slid open.
“Well . . . ” Molina commented.
The door opened partway and two piercing eyes scrutinized the street for a few seconds. Finally it opened completely and Madeleine Bonneau consented to come out of her bunker. She was wearing a faded mauve nylon blouse decorated with pink flowers that seemed to have withered with time. She walked toward them at a slow pace, carefully sliding her furry slippers over the uneven pavement of her tiny courtyard. She stopped in front of the gate.
“Please excuse me for making you wait, but these days a woman living alone can’t be too careful. Especially since I was already a little apprehensive . . . Since Mr. Roman’s murder I’ve been literally terrified.”
Despite her excuses, she didn’t open her gate and left the policemen on the sidewalk.
“What can I do for you, Messieurs?”
“I’d like you to talk to me about the car that you saw on this street the other day.”
“I told your colleagues everything.”
“Could you tell me again, please? One never knows: an important detail might come back to you.”
The former English teacher looked him up and down as if she were dealing with a particularly stupid student.
“It was Sunday morning. I saw that car for the first time around 10:30. It was driving down the street very slowly. That was already astonishing; these days, people drive so fast, even in residential zones . . . Then hardly an hour later it went by again and stopped a little farther on.”
“Did you see the driver when he got out of the car?” Sebag asked, full of hope.
“Of course not,” she replied with scorn. “You don’t suppose that I spend my days spying on my neighbors? After ten minutes, nobody had budged, so I left the window.”
“And when the car passed in front of your house, did you see anything or anyone inside it?”
“Don’t you remember what the weather was like on Sunday? A genuine deluge. The windows of the car were all fogged up, I couldn’t see anything.”
“You described a small white car to our colleagues. Can’t you say any more about what kind of car it was?”
“If I could have, I would have. I don’t know anything about cars. But I know the license plate was Spanish.”
Sebag noticed that Molina was getting angry. He thanked the old bat, who immediately turned around and slipped back toward her cavern.
“I hope the next witness will be friendlier,” Molina commented. “Who is it?”
Sebag consulted his notes.
“Gabriel Coutin, at number 12 on this same street.”
Leaning over his bicycle in his driveway, the other neighbor was adjusting his dérailleur when they approached. Gabriel Coutin stood up, displaying before them a cyclist’s jersey more covered with ads than a screen on a private Italian television channel.
“It was a SEAT, not a Clio. Since your colleagues came by, I’ve checked on the internet. I compared the cars, and it was a SEAT Ibiza.”
“Are you really sure?” Sebag asked, disappointed. “The two cars look quite a lot alike, after all.”
/> “I know, and that’s what fooled me, because I don’t know a lot about cars. I can distinguish a Campagnolo from a Shimano dérailleur with my eyes closed, but so far as cars are concerned, nothing, absolutely nothing, I don’t like them. But I informed myself, I looked at photos, and now I no longer have any doubt.”
From the back pocket of his jersey he pulled out some tattered papers.
“Here, I’ve still got the photos on me.”
He unfolded them and showed the policemen.
“See, the front of the two cars is very different. The grille, for instance, is much bigger on the SEAT. And the car that I saw the day before yesterday had a big grille. “
Molina asked him a few more questions while Sebag moved away a few steps to call Pascal Lucas. But his hope was short-lived. The van driver turned out to be an expert on car bodies and he remained absolutely certain.
“The car that ran the stop sign was a Clio, and even a rather recent model.”
Molina came up to him just as he was hanging up. He saw his disappointment.
“You can’t win ’em all, champ. That doesn’t change anything: you’re still the best.”
They got back in their car. Molina drove.
“I suggest that we now go look around Moulin-à-Vent. Since we think that Roman’s killer is driving a white Seat with Spanish plates, we’ll go ask Martinez’s neighbors. And we’ll ask about the Clio as well as the Seat. You never know. If they don’t remember the killer’s car, with any luck they’ll have seen the reckless driver’s car.”
He drove away, slowly for once. From the fast road that took them back to Perpignan, the view of Le Canigou was sublime. Heavy snow had covered the summit with a layer of powdered sugar. Just as they were leaving the interchange and were about to head for the heights of Moulin-à-Vent, Sebag received a call from Ménard.
“You don’t know the best news?”
“Not yet, but I can hardly wait.”
“I tracked down a former barbouze who might be a good suspect. There aren’t many barbouzes still alive, apparently. After the Algerian War, my guy, Maurice Garcin, was a member of the SAC, a sort of parallel police for the Gaullist party that was dissolved in 1981. He wrote a few books about his memories of his combat activity in Algiers, and he was always very hard on his former adversaries. Julie even found a text of his on the internet, and it’s pretty virulent, close to defamatory. Garcin was also a member of an association for victims of the OAS. In 2008 they got a court to require the destruction of a monument in Marignane identical to the one in Perpignan.”
Autumn, All the Cats Return Page 20
